The Constraint Logic Programming Language CHIP

CHIP is a new logic language combining the declarative aspects of logic programming with the efficiency of constraint solving techniques. It has been designed to tackle real world constrained search problems. It extends usual Prolog-like logic languages by introducing three new computation domains namely finite domain restricted terms, boolean terms and linear rational terms. For each of them CHIP uses specialized constraint solving techniques: consistency techniques for finite domains, equation solving in Boolean algebra and a symbolic simplex-like algorithm for rationals. CHIP has been successfully applied to a large number of industrial problems especially in the areas of planning, scheduling and circuit design. For all these problems the flexibility and the efficiency of CHIP has been systematically demonstrated.