Paper:
Language: English:

Converting Constraint Handling Rules to Equivalent Transformation Rules

Yoshinori Shigeta^, Kiyoshi Akama^, Hiroshi Mabuchi^,
and Hidekatsu Koike^****

^SoC Research and Development Center, Toshiba Corporation, 580-1 Horikawa-cho, Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki 212-8520, Japan
^Division of Large-Scale Computational Systems, Information Initiative Center, Hokkaido University, Kita 11 Nishi 5, Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido 060-0811, Japan
^Faculty of Software and Information Science, Iwate Prefectural University, 152-52 Sugo, Takizawa, Iwate 020-0193, Japan
^****Faculty of Social Information, Sapporo Gakuin University, 11-banchi Bunkyodai, Ebetsu, Hokkaido 060-8555, Japan

Received: February 22, 2005

Accepted: December 21, 2005

Keywords: equivalent transformation rule, constraint handling rule

Journal ref: Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol.10, No.3 pp. 339-348, 2006

Abstract

We present a way to convert constraint handling rules (CHRs) to equivalent transformation rules (ETRs) and demonstrate the correctness of the conversion in equivalent transformation (ET) theory.

In the ET computation model, computation is regarded as equivalent transformations of a description. A description is transformed successively by ETRs. Extensively used in the domain of first-order terms, the ET computation model has also been applied to knowledge processing in such data domains as RDF, UML, and XML.

A CHR is a multiheaded guarded rule that rewrites constraints into simpler ones until they are solved. CHRs and ETRs are similar in syntax but they have completely different theoretical bases for the correctness of their computation. CHRs are based on the logical equivalence of logical formulas, while ETRs are based on the set equivalence of descriptions.

We convert CHRs to rules used in the ET model and demonstrate converted rules to be correct ETRs, i.e., they preserve meanings of descriptions. We discuss correspondences and differences between CHRs and ETRs in theories, giving examples of correct ETRs that cannot be represented as CHRs.

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