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Parallelism, concurrency and distribution in constraint handling rules: A survey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2018

THOM FRÜHWIRTH
THOM FRÜHWIRTH*
Affiliation:
Institute of Software Engineering and Programming Languages, Ulm University 89069 Ulm, Germany (e-mail: thom.fruehwirth@uni-ulm.de)
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Abstract

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Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is both an effective concurrent declarative programming language and a versatile computational logic formalism. In CHR, guarded reactive rules rewrite a multi-set of constraints. Concurrency is inherent, since rules can be applied to the constraints in parallel. In this comprehensive survey, we give an overview of the concurrent, parallel as well as distributed CHR semantics, standard and more exotic, that have been proposed over the years at various levels of refinement. These semantics range from the abstract to the concrete. They are related by formal soundness results. Their correctness is proven as a correspondence between parallel and sequential computations. On the more practical side, we present common concise example CHR programs that have been widely used in experiments and benchmarks. We review parallel and distributed CHR implementations in software as well as hardware. The experimental results obtained show a parallel speed-up for unmodified sequential CHR programs. The software implementations are available online for free download and we give the web links. Due to its high level of abstraction, the CHR formalism can also be used to implement and analyse models for concurrency. To this end, the Software Transaction Model, the Actor Model, Colored Petri Nets and the Join-Calculus have been faithfully encoded in CHR. Finally, we identify and discuss commonalities of the approaches surveyed and indicate what problems are left open for future research.

Keywords

parallelismconcurrencydistributionconstraint handling rulesdeclarative programmingconcurrent constraint programmingsemanticsrewritingconcurrency models
Type
Survey Article
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 18 , Special Issue 5-6: Special Issue on Parallel and Distributed Logic Programming , September 2018 , pp. 759 - 805
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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