CHR 2006

Third Workshop on Constraint Handling Rules

to be held in Venice (Italy) at the occasion of ICALP 2006

July 9, 2006

Workshop Report

The third workshop on Constraint Handling Rules (CHR 2006) took place on July 9, 2006 at the occasion of the 33rd ICALP conference. Previous workshops were organised at the occasion of ICLP 2005 in Sitges, Spain and in Ulm, Germany in 2004. Last year's success was continued this year with a program of 9 accepted papers out of 11 submitted papers. All papers had received at least two reviews and most even three.

The workshop venue was the lovely San Servolo island in Venice, Italy. About 20 attendants listened to presentations on diverse topics ranging from semantics and theoretical properties such as confluence and complexity, over language features and implementation to constraint solvers and agent programming. In addition, we were honoured to have an invited talk by Kazunori Ueda (Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan) on his LMNtal language, which is closely related to CHR. The co-located PPDP symposium was also of special interest: its program featured two papers on type inference with CHR and an invited talk on the "Story So Far" by CHR's designer Thom Fruehwirth.

We would like to thank all the authors, participants and PC members for their support and contributions. Special thanks go to the local organisers, Michele Bugliesi and his team, and Alessandra Raffaeta, who has organised our workshop dinner in Osteria Paradiso Perduto on the eventful night of Italy's victory in the soccer championship.

Next year there will of course be a fourth installment of the CHR workshop. It is to early to reveal anything about the date and time of CHR 2007, but we are already looking forward to see you there.

Tom Schrijvers

Proceedings

The workshop proceedings have been published as a technical report.

Important dates

CHR 2006 Preliminary Programme - July 9, 2006

09:15 - 09:30 Workshop Opening
9:30 - 10:00 Representing Linear-Logic Agents in CHR
Edmund S. L. Lam, Martin Sulzmann
10:00 - 10:30 Coffee Break
10:30 - 11:30 Invited Talk by Kazunori Ueda, Waseda University, Japan
LMNtal as a Unifying Declarative Language
11:30 - 12:00 Implementation of an F-Logic Kernel in CHR
Martin Kaeser, Marc Meister
12:00 - 12:30 Deriving Linear-Time Algorithms from Union-Find in CHR
Thom Frühwirth
12:30 - 14:30 Lunch Break
14:30 - 15:00 Observable Confluence for Constraint Handling Rules
Gregory J. Duck, Peter J. Stuckey, Martin Sulzmann
15:00 - 15:30 Complexity of the CHR Rational Tree Equation Solver
Marc Meister, Thom Frühwirth
15:45 - 16:15 A Compositional Semantics for CHR with Propagation Rules
Maurizio Gabbrielli, Maria Chaira Meo, Paolo Tacchella
16:00 - 16:30 Coffee Break
16:30 - 17:00 Search Strategies in CHR(Prolog)
Leslie De Koninck, Tom Schrijvers, Bart Demoen
17:00 - 17:30 Constraint Handling Rules with Negations as Absence
Peter Van Weert, Jon Sneyers, Tom Schrijvers, Bart Demoen
17:30 - 18:00 Translating Constraint Handling Rules into Action Rules
Tom Schrijvers, Neng-Fa Zhou, Bart Demoen
18:00 - 18:15 Discussion and Workshop Closing

Invited Talk

LMNtal as a Unifying Declarative Language, Kazunori Ueda, Waseda University

LMNtal (pronounced "elemental") is a simple language model based on hierarchical graph rewriting that uses logical variables to represent connectivity and membranes to represent hierarchy. LMNtal is an outcome of the attempt to unify constraint-based concurrency (also known as concurrent constraint programming) and Constraint Handling Rules (CHR), the two notable extensions to concurrent logic programming. LMNtal is intended to be a substrate language of various computational models, especially those addressing concurrency, mobility and multiset rewriting.

Another important goal of LMNtal has been to put hierarchical graph rewriting into practice and demonstrate its versatility by designing and implementing a full-fledged, monolithic programming language.

In this talk, we demonstrate the practical aspects of LMNtal using a number of examples taken from diverse areas of computer science. Also, we discuss the relationship between LMNtal and CHR and their future directions in the hope that it will promote cross-fertilization of ideas and results we have accumulated.

Registration

Registration for the CHR 2006 workshop is possible through the ICALP/PPDP/LOPSTR'06 and affiliated Workshops registration page. Early registration ends on May 31.

Introduction

The Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) language has become a major declarative specification and implementation language for constraint-based algorithms and applications. Algorithms are often specified using inference rules, rewrite rules, sequents, proof rules or logical axioms that can be directly written in CHR. Its clean semantics facilitates program design, analysis and transformation. See the CHR website for more information.

The First Workshop on Constraint Handling Rules was organized in May 2004 in Ulm, Germany. In October 2005 the Second Workshop on Constraint Handling Rules was organized at the occasion of ICLP 2005 in Sitges, Spain.

Topics of Interest

The workshop calls for full papers and short papers describing ongoing work, on all aspects of CHR, including topics such as:

The call for papers is avaibale here.

Best Paper Award

The best paper receives the CHR Best Paper Award. It is chosen among all submissions for its outstanding quality in both presentation and scientific contribution and for its impact on the field of CHR.

The 2005 CHR Best Paper Award went to:

The Computational Power and Complexity of Constraint Handling Rules.
Jon Sneyers, Tom Schrijvers, Bart Demoen

Submission Information

All papers must be written in English and not exceed 15 pages in Springer LNCS format. The authors are encouraged, although not obliged, to submit their papers already in Springer LNCS format. General information about the Springer LNCS series and the LNCS authors' instructions are available at the Springer LNCS/LNAI home page.

Submissions should be sent to chrworkshop@gmail.com and mention 'CHR 2006 Submission' in the subject. Every submission should include the names and e-mail addresses of the authors (with the corresponding author indicated), the paper abstract in ASCII format and the actual paper in postscript or PDF format. The submission should also indicate whether it is a full paper or a short paper.

Accepted papers will be published in a technical report.

Organization

Program Committee:

Workshop Coordinators:

Tom Schrijvers (contact person)
Department of Computer Science
K.U.Leuven
http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~toms/

Thom Frühwirth
Fakultät für Informatik
Universität Ulm
http://www.informatik.uni-ulm.de/pm/fileadmin/pm/home/fruehwirth/

Last update: 26-07-2006