A Design for a Generic Constraint Solver for Ordered Domains

It is well known that the expressive power and efficiency of Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) systems is reduced by the strong partitioning of the domains in which constraints can be expressed. This means constraints defined on a particular domain must be solved by a specific reasoning method with its associated solver that is not appropriate for constraints defined on other domains. In this paper, we describe a common unified framework for constraints on any computation domain in which an ordering has been defined. It is based on a single generic constraint and unique inference rule. We demonstrate, through examples, the expressiveness of our framework on a number of domains