Automated Analysis of CLP(FD) Program Execution Traces

The operational behavior of constraint programs is not easy to understand. We propose an approach where high-level views of executions are built on top of low-level tracers. We describe an analysis module which can analyze on the y execution traces. Application programmers or end-users can easily program trace analysis tools without knowing any implementation details about the solver or the tracer. Most of the trace ltering can be done without storing or even generating any trace information. The analysis can thus be very eecient. The analysis scheme was initially designed for the analysis of Prolog. It has been extended in order to cope with the constraint store. In this article we give three signiicant examples of analyses of CLP(FD) constraint propagation. This study shows that the scheme is generic enough to accommodate yet another, quite diierent, trace model.