Constraint programming plays an ever more important role in many real-life applications that require automated decision making. This somewhat poorly edited collection of papers attempts to bridge the gap between researchers working on constraint programming algorithms and researchers who design solutions to decision-making problems. The book is a collection of extended papers originally presented at the International Constraint Programming and Decision Making Workshops (CoProd) from 2008 to 2013.

The volume consists of 22 papers that are organized around six topics: (1) how to formulate the problem of decision making in the general case (papers 2 and 10); (2) how to combine different criteria in multi-criterion decision making (papers 7, 9, 13, and 20); (3) how to decide when problems are algorithmically solvable (papers 1, 3, and 11); (4) how do to design efficient algorithms for solving constraint optimization problems (papers 5, 6, 10, 12, 14, 18, and 19); (5) how to take uncertainty into account (papers 4, 8, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, and 22); and (6) some of the resulting applications (papers 7, 15, and 17).

These are very important and interesting questions, but unfortunately the book itself is not organized around them. We simply get 22 papers in what appears to be a random ordering. It is up to the reader to make the connections. In the preface, the editors mention a 23rd paper that is supposed to be in the collection, but for unknown reasons only 22 papers are included. The author index at the end of the book is also incorrect and the preface misspells the word “constraint.” While these are small mistakes, they add to the impression that this book was put together in a rush and without great care. Another more major weakness of this volume is that--even though these papers are the result of several workshops--so few different authors and viewpoints are represented here. Several authors have multiple papers in this collection. There is even a potential conflict of interest: nine of the 22 papers are co-authored by the first editor and ten of the 22 papers are co-authored by the second editor. In my opinion, this is an at best questionable practice that distracts from the importance of this topic and the quality of the papers. If one considers only the six topics around which this book is organized, one would think that, given the sources of the material presented, the authors would have been better served in reorganizing this material into a textbook. For these reasons, I am unable to recommend this book.