Towards a Constraint-Based Engineering Framework for Algorithm Design and Application

The search for programming frameworks that provide the formalism that can help organize literally thousands of algorithmic ideas and facilitate their applications to new problems is an important research direction in computer science. That is, we are seeking to develop a practical programming environment that allows the user to state a family of problems, and subsequently systematically apply a collection of established algorithmic techniques to individual problems correctly. In this note we informally discuss constraint networks as a vehicle that provides a general framework for the synthesis, abstraction and application of problem-specific algorithms.