Logic programming for combinatorial problems

Combinatorial problems appear in many areas in science, engineering, biomedicine, business, and operations research. This article presents a new intelligent computing approach for solving combinatorial problems, involving permutations and combinations, by incorporating logic programming. An overview of applied combinatorial problems in various domains is given. Such computationally hard and popular combinatorial problems as the traveling salesman problem are discussed to illustrate the usefulness of the logic programming approach. Detailed discussions of implementation of combinatorial problems with time complexity analyses are presented in Prolog, the standard language of logic programming. These programs can be easily integrated into other systems to implement logic programming in combinatorics.