ITE: A Lightweight Implementation of Stratified Reasoning for Constructive Logical Operators

Abstract

Constraint Programming (CP) is a powerful declarative programming paradigm where inference and search are interleaved to find feasible and optimal solutions to various type of constraint systems. However, handling logical connectors with constructive information in CP is notoriously difficult. This paper presents If Then Else (ITE), a lightweight implementation of stratified constructive reasoning for logical connectives. Stratification is introduced to cope with the risk of combinatorial explosion of constructing information from nested and combined logical operators. ITE is an open-source library built on top of SICStus Prolog clpfd, which proposes various operators, including constructive disjunction and negation, constructive implication and conditional. These operators can be used to express global constraints and to benefit from constructive reasoning for more domain pruning during constraint filtering. Even though ITE is not competitive with specialized filtering algorithms available in some global constraints implementations, its expressiveness allows users to easily define well-tuned constraints with powerful deduction capabilities. Our extended experimental results show that ITE is more efficient than available generic approaches that handle logical constraint systems over finite domains.