
Stefano Bistarelli is associate professor of Computer Science at the
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Perugia
and a research associate at the Institute for Computer Science and Telematics
(IIT) at the CNR (Italian National Research Council) in Pisa.
His research interests range from Artificial Intelligence to Programming
Languages, with particular attention to constraint programming, constraint
solution algorithms, and soft constraints.
He also works on Computer Security and recently on Economics.
Semirings for soft constraint solving and programming
Constraint satisfaction and constraint programming have shown to be very
simple but powerful ideas, with applications in various areas. Still, in the
last ten years, the simple notion of constraints has shown some deficiencies
concerning both theory and practice, typically in the way over-constrained
problems and preferences are treated. For this reason, the notion of soft
constraints has been introduced with semiring-based soft constraints and
valued constraints being the two main general frameworks.