Dynamic Flexible Constraint Satisfaction and its Application to AI Planning

First, I would like to thank my principal supervisor Dr Qiang Shen for all his help, advice and friendship throughout. Many thanks also to my second supervisor Dr Peter Jarvis for his enthusiasm, help and friendship. I would also like to thank the other members of the Approximate and Qualitative Reasoning group at Edinburgh who have also helped and inspired me. This project has been funded by an EPSRC studentship, award num­ ber 97305803. I would like, therefore, to extend my gratitude to EPSRC