Recent advances in constraints

This volume contains a selection of papers from the Joint ERCIM/CologNet Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming, held at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre from the 19th to the 21st of June 2002. The workshop co-located two events: the seventh meeting of the ERCIM Working Group on Constraints, co-ordinated by Krzysztof Apt, and the ?rst annual workshop of the CologNet Area for Constraint and Logic Programming, co-ordinated by Francesca Rossi. The aim of this workshop was to provide a forum where researchers in c- straint processing could meet in an informal setting and discuss their most recent work. The Cork Constraint Computation Centre was chosen as the venue for the workshop because it is a new research centre, supported by Science Foundation Ireland and led by Eugene Freuder, which is entirely devoted to studying c- straint processing. Thus, the workshop participants had an opportunity to see the centre, meet its members and investigate the potential for future collabo- tion. Amongst the topics addressed by the papers in this volume are: veri?cation and debugging of constraint logic programs; modelling and solving CSPs; exp- nation generation; inference and consistency processing; SAT and 0/1 encodings of CSPs; soft constraints and constraint relaxation; real-world applications; and distributed constraint solving.