This award will enable Prof. Ken McAloon and co-workers of Brooklyn College, City University of New York, to collaborate with Prof. Fumio Mizoguchi of the Science University of Tokyo, Japan, over a period of two years. They will explore the development of a new field of logic study, which they term "Applied Constraint Logic." The application of this type of logic to artificial intelligence, operations research, and software engineering will be explored. The purpose of this research is to develop sequential and parallel constraint solvers for constraint logic programming systems, and ultimately to combine constraint logic concepts with those of artificial intelligence to produce a prototype decision support system for financial applications. Constraint logic programming combines rule-based systems with systems in which components of a problem are stated as constraints, and the problem as a whole is represented by linking the constraints together by means of rules. In some applications constraint conditions represent problems more naturally than absolute quantitative conditions, and for these problems constraint-based systems should be more efficient than standard programming languages. In this project the Japanese group's work on arithmetic constraint solvers, and on development of logic programming systems, will be combined with the experience of the U.S. group on the development of algorithms for generalized linear constraints and on software development in constraint languages. This research could have great impact on our approach to programming for artificial intelligence tasks.
