Title: Parallelism, Concurrency and Distribution in Constraint Handling Rules: A Survey,
Abstract: Constraint Handling Rules is an effective concurrent declarative programming
language and a versatile computational logic formalism. CHR programs consist of
guarded reactive rules that transform multisets of constraints. One of the main
features of CHR is its inherent concurrency. Intuitively, rules can be applied
to parts of a multiset in parallel. In this comprehensive survey, we give an
overview of concurrent and parallel as well as distributed CHR semantics,
standard and more exotic, that have been proposed over the years at various
levels of refinement. These semantics range from the abstract to the concrete.
They are related by formal soundness results. Their correctness is established
as correspondence between parallel and sequential computations. We present
common concise sample CHR programs that have been widely used in experiments
and benchmarks. We review parallel CHR implementations in software and
hardware. The experimental results obtained show a consistent parallel speedup.
Most implementations are available online. The CHR formalism can also be used
to implement and reason with models for concurrency. To this end, the Software
Transaction Model, the Actor Model, Colored Petri Nets and the Join-Calculus
have been faithfully encoded in CHR. Under consideration in Theory and Practice
of Logic Programming (TPLP).