Section: Overall Objectives

Introduction

Constraint Logic Programming supports a great ambition for making of programming essentially a modeling task, with equations, constraints and logical formulas. Its foundation is the use of relations on mathematical variables to compute with partial information.

This research field is born during the mid 80s from the combination of Logic Programming, Constraint Propagation techniques in Artificial Intelligence and Linear Programming in Operations Research. Thanks to its capability to combine heterogeneous resolution techniques (numerical, continuous, discrete, symbolic, deductive, heuristic) in a simple logical setting, this approach has shown particularly successful for solving combinatorial optimization problems ranging from pure academic problems to real-life problems in industry, commerce or biology.

The "Contraintes" group investigates the theoretical foundations, design, implementation and applications of rule-based languages and constraint solving techniques in two main domains: combinatorial optimization and computational systems biology. More generally in the later domain, Contraintes develops formal methods for systems biology and investigates the tight integration of in silico and in vivo approaches in systems and synthetic biology.