A Meta Constraint Logic Programming Scheme

We present a Meta Constraint Logic Programming (MCLP) general scheme. The idea behind the work concerns the possibility of building meta CLP architectures by adding CLP solvers as meta level reasoners on the constraints of the underlying object systems. In this way, we are able not only to increase the expressive power of CLP, but also to implement several constraint satisfaction techniques like arc, path and in general, k-consistency by using lower degrees of consistency algorithms in order to obtain higher degrees of consistency. The purpose of the work is to provide a general scheme which can be specialized in those domains and applications where the expressive power of CLP does not suce. A distinguishing feature of the architectural scheme concerns its operational semantics and, in particular, the linking rules between dierent levels. In this paper, we propose, as an example, two dierent specializations of a Meta CLP on nite domains (FD) architecture: the rst concerns the possibility of embedding the capability of performing qualitative reasoning in a CLP framework, while the second concerns a multi-level architecture for obtaining dierent degrees of consistency by using weaker algorithms.