Constraint Programming

Definitions

1. A programming approach in which problems are modeled as variables subject to constraints, and a solver searches for values that satisfy those constraints. Constraint programming is especially useful for scheduling, configuration, resource allocation, and combinatorial optimization tasks that would be awkward to solve procedurally by hand.

   In plain English: A way of solving problems by describing the rules and letting a solver find valid answers.

   Example: "The rostering system switched to constraint programming because manually encoding every staffing edge case in imperative logic had become unmaintainable."

Related Terms

• Dynamic Programming
• Greedy Algorithm
• Backtracking
• Big-O
• Binary Tree
• Cache
• Graph
• Hash Table