We now present an instance of a constraint language that we are going to use in this thesis. The language is based on the definition of [Smolka1992]. Smolka provides us with a very expressive constraint language including feature equation, conjunction, disjunction, negation, and existential quantification. For the purpose of this thesis it suffices to use only a small subset of Smolka's constructions, namely feature equation and conjunction.
Although we only use simple constructions in order to highlight
the new results in a clean but simple way, the generalization of
Höhfeld and Smolka's scheme guarantees that the results of this thesis also
carry over to more complex constraint languages.
The same subset has also been used by [VanNoord1993] (because of the same reasons), and following him, we call the ``constraint'' constraint language .