Intervals

## 1.4 Intervals

Besides finite domains, ECLiPSe also offers continuous domains in the form of numeric intervals. These are also implemented by the ic library, which is an integration of an integer finite domain solver and interval reasoning over continuous intervals4. It solves equations and inequations between general arithmetic expressions over continuous or integral variables. The expressions can include non-linear functions such as sin, built-in constants such as pi. Piecewise linear unary functions are also available.
In addition to constraints, ic offers search techniques (splitting [20] and squashing [17]) for solving problems involving continuous numeric variables.