Meta linear constraints in constraint logic programming

This article introduces meta linear constraints in constraint logic programming and addresses the related problem of incremental entailment of linear constraint. We present first the syntax and semantics of our meta-constraints. After a brief overview of linear constraint solving, two forms for ask constraints are introduced that simplify the entailment test. Some properties and entailment algorithms are then described. Meta linear constraints have been integrated to the CLP language Athena. Practical experiments with optimization problems show a substantial reduction of the search tree and of the computation time.