ITE: A Lightweight Implementation of Stratified Reasoning for
  Constructive Logical Operators
  Constraint Programming (CP) is a powerful declarative programming paradigm
where inference and search are interleaved to find feasible and optimal
solutions to various type of constraint systems. However, handling logical
connectors with constructive information in CP is notoriously difficult. This
paper presents If Then Else (ITE), a lightweight implementation of stratified
constructive reasoning for logical connectives. Stratification is introduced to
cope with the risk of combinatorial explosion of constructing information from
nested and combined logical operators. ITE is an open-source library built on
top of SICStus Prolog clp(fd), which proposes various operators, including
constructive disjunction and negation, constructive implication and
conditional. These operators can be used to express global constraints and to
benefit from constructive reasoning for more domain pruning during constraint
filtering. Even though ITE is not competitive with specialized filtering
algorithms available in some global constraints implementations, its
expressiveness allows users to easily define well-tuned constraints with
powerful deduction capabilities. Our extended experimental results show that
ITE is more efficient than available generic approaches that handle logical
constraint systems over finite domains.
