Rule Based Programming with Constraints and Strategies

We present a framework for Rule Based Programming with Constraints and Strategies. It is implemented in the ELAN language, that provides an environment for specifying and prototyping deduction systems. The existence of strategies provides the user with the possibility to make choices, to act upon them, and to retract if needed using backtracking. To illustrate the framework, we formalise a planning problem, namely a controller for printing tasks, that shows how to combine rules, strategies and constraint solving on finite domains.