Constraint satisfaction techniques for the generation phase in declarative modeling

Declarative modeling is an emergent research domain in computer-aided geometric design. To deal with the generation problems in declarative modeling, a recent approach consists in using constraint satisfaction techniques. After an introduction to constraint satisfaction and an overview of related works in declarative modeling, this chapter presents an object-oriented constraint solver. This generic tool is based on constraint propagation and domain reduction and supports heterogeneous parameters. It can be used in many generation systems. As an application, a declarative modeler for virtual 3D-environments planning is briefly presented.