Research Experience

I did my PhD studies under the supervision of Peter Van Roy and Yves Deville. The topic of my thesis was Solving Constrained Graph Problems using Reachability Constraints based on Transitive Closure and Dominators. Constrained graph problems have to do with finding graphs that respect a set of given constraints. We were particularly interested in using dominators for narrowing the search space. In order to serve this purpose, we introduced a global constraint, named DomReachability, that combines the notions of domination and reachability.

One of the problems that can be modeled with DomReachability is The Bounded Transitive Closure Problem (BTC). Given the directed graphs $g_{min}$ , $g_{max}$ , $tcg_{min}$ and $tcg_{max}$ , the goal is to find a directed graph $g$ such that:

$$\begin{array}{c} g_{min} \subseteq g \subseteq g_{max} \mbo... ...cg_{min} \subseteq TransClos(g) \subseteq tcg_{max} \end{array}$$

It is worth mentioning that The Disjoint Paths Problem can be easily reduced to BTC.

I worked on a project with the European aerospace industry. The goal of the project was the development of a system capable of automatically managing the mission of an uninhabited air vehicle, which was expected to perform a mission in hostile territory almost without the support of human operators. The prototype that we implemented was based on constraint programming techniques.

I have also been a member of the research team AVISPA since 1995. The aim of the group is to develop models for an integration of Object Oriented and Concurrent Constraint Programming into a Visual Language, so as to have a programming environment sustained in a rich semantics that eases the task of developing computer music application.