Section: Software and Platforms

Rules2CP

Participants : François Fages, Raphaël Martin, Thierry Martinez.

Rules2CP is a rule-based modeling language for constraint programming. It is distributed since 2009 as open-source. Unlike other modeling languages for constraint programming, 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. This allows us to model complex 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 the rules' left-hand sides.

The expressiveness of Rules2CP has been illustrated in the FP6 Strep project Net-WMS by a complete library for packing problems, called PKML (Packing Knowledge Modeling Library), 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.