CLAIRE: combining sets, search and rules to better express algorithms

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents a programming language that includes paradigms that are usually associated with declarative languages, such as sets, rules and search, into an imperative (functional) language. Although these paradigms are separately well-known and available under various programming environments, the originality of the CLAIRE language comes from the tight integration, which yields interesting run-time performances, and from the richness of this combination, which yields new ways to express complex algorithmic patterns with few elegant lines. To achieve the opposite goals of a high abstraction level (conciseness and readability) and run-time performance (CLAIRE is used as a C++ pre-processor), we have developed two kinds of compiler technology. First, a pattern pre-processor handles iterations over both concrete and abstract sets (data types and program fragments), in a completely user-extensible manner. Second, an inference compiler transforms a set of logical rules into a set of functions (demons that are used through procedural attachment).

Airspace sectorization with constraints

“…The constraint based model has been implemented with the constraint programming library CHOCO [26] in language CLAIRE [27]. All programs have been run on a PC Athlon 2000+, 1GB RAM, under Windows XP.…”

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“…Many complex modeling tools are available for describing and solving combinatorial constraint problems, such as those presented in [26,14,33,11,19]. These modeling tools provide mechanisms for describing domainconstraints, a set of knowledge, and finding solutions to the constraints.…”

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“…The technique used to provide the decision making process is based on a cumulative scheduling CSP (5). Usually, this is defined as the maximum allowable limit from a finite 'pool' of resource that can be used collectively by the agents at any given time (6).…”