Schedulers for Rule-based Constraint Programming

TL;DR

This paper develops a specialized scheduler for rule-based constraint programming, improving performance over standard CHR rule execution by systematically deriving it from a generic iteration algorithm.

Contribution

It introduces a new scheduler derived from a generic algorithm, optimized for membership rules in rule-based constraint programming, enhancing efficiency.

Findings

Significantly better performance for membership rules

Systematic derivation from a generic iteration algorithm

Improved execution efficiency over standard CHR rules

Abstract

We study here schedulers for a class of rules that naturally arise in the context of rule-based constraint programming. We systematically derive a scheduler for them from a generic iteration algorithm of Apt [2000]. We apply this study to so-called membership rules of Apt and Monfroy [2001]. This leads to an implementation that yields for these rules a considerably better performance than their execution as standard CHR rules.