Robust search procedures are a central component in the design of black-box constraint-programming solvers. This paper proposes activity-based search, the idea of using the activity of variables during propagation to guide the search. Activity-based search was compared experimentally to impact-based search and the WDEG heuristics. Experimental results on a variety of benchmarks show that activity-based search is more robust than other heuristics and may produce significant improvements in performance.
@article{arxiv.1105.6314,
title = {Activity-Based Search for Black-Box Contraint-Programming Solvers},
author = {L. Michel and P. Van Hentenryck},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1105.6314},
year = {2011}
}