Constraint satisfaction and database theory: A tutorial

Abstract

A large class of problems in AI and other areas of computer science can be viewed as constraint-satisfaction problems. This includes problems in machine vision, belief maintenance, scheduling, temporal reasoning, type reconstruction, graph theory, and satisfiability. In general, the constraint satisfaction-problem is NP-complete, so searching for tractable cases is an active research area. It turns out that constraint satisfaction has an intimate connection with database theory: constraint-satisfaction problems can be recast as database problems and database problems can be recast as constraint-satisfaction problems. In this tutorial, I will cover the fundamentals of constraints satisfaction and describe its intimate relationship with database theory from various perspectives.