Section: Software

Rules2CP

Participants : François Fages, Julien Martin, Thierry Martinez.

Rules2CP is a rule-based modelling language for constraint programming. Rules2CP is under development since 2006, and distributed as open-source since 2009.

Unlike other modelling languages, Rules2CP adopts a single knowledge representation paradigm based on rules without recursion, and a restricted set of data structures based on records and enumerated lists given with iterators. We show that this is sufficient to model constraint satisfaction problems, together with search strategies where search trees are expressed by logical formulae, and heuristic choice criteria are defined with preference orderings by pattern-matching on rules' left-hand sides.

The expressiveness of Rules2CP is illustrated with a complete library for packing problems, called PKML, which, in addition to pure bin packing and bin design problems, can deal with common sense rules about weights, stability, as well as specific packing business rules.