  In this article, we propose an algorithmic framework for globally solving
mixed problems with continuous variables and categorical variables whose
properties are available from a catalog. It supports catalogs of arbitrary size
and properties of arbitrary dimension, and does not require any modeling effort
from the user. Our tree search approach, similar to spatial branch and bound
methods, performs an exhaustive exploration of the range of the properties of
the categorical variables ; branching, constraint programming and catalog
lookup phases alternate to discard inconsistent values. A novel catalog-based
contractor guarantees consistency between the categorical properties and the
existing catalog items. This results in an intuitive generic approach that is
exact and easy to implement. We demonstrate the validity of the approach on a
numerical example in which a categorical variable is described by a
two-dimensional property space.
