Specification and computation of optimization problems

In [JOM95] we introduced a specification language, that we call partial-order programming, where we showed that partial-order clauses help render clear and concise formulations to a different kind of problems, in particular optimization problems. We also presented a formal semantics to this language as well as a top-down-procedure to compute the semantics of a large class of programs that we call monotonic. In [OJ97] we gave a definition of a semantics for partial-order programs that do not have to be monotonic, and we showed that this semantics is well-behaved [Dix95]. In this paper we discuss some more typical problems that have a simple specification in our language. We briefly compare both approaches.