Towards Constraint-Informed Information Systems
Résumé
Declarative techniques such as Constraint Program- ming are very useful in modeling complex requirements. They have the added benefit of being executable specifications and, when properly tuned, high-performance ones. In this paper we argue that Information Systems ought to include constraint-based techniques in their design and imple- mentation. We support this claim by introducing tools based on constraint programming, which we apply to an actual use-case: the academic timetable construction and maintenance problem, asdevelopedattheUniversityofE ́vora.Thesystemwebuiltwas implemented using the GNU Prolog language. Moreover, Constraints have the potential to describe global properties that a model must observe, which makes them a semantically very interesting extension to the capabilities of present model-driven techniques and tools.