Strategic directions in constraint programming

Constraint programming (CP) is the study of computational systems based on constraints. Some of the earliest ideas leading to constraint programming may be found in the artificial intelligence area dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. An overview is provided of developments in CP in various subfields: 1. artificial intelligence, 2. databases, 3. user interfaces, 4. operations research, 5. concurrency, robotics and control theory, 6. programming tools, and 7. language implementation techniques. Several directions for research that are promising for systems, programming environments, models, and application packages are discussed: 1. more realistic constraint systems and languages, 2. efficient modeling, 3. constraint-based distributed systems, 4. towards faster, more efficient systems, 5. constraint databases, and 6. user interfaces.