Related papers: The Rough Guide to Constraint Propagation
Constraint propagation algorithms form an important part of most of the constraint programming systems. We provide here a simple, yet very general framework that allows us to explain several constraint propagation algorithms in a systematic…
Constraint propagation is a general algorithmic approach for pruning the search space of a CSP. In a uniform way, K. R. Apt has defined a computation as an iteration of reduction functions over a domain. He has also demonstrated the need…
Constraint programming is a family of techniques for solving combinatorial problems, where the problem is modelled as a set of decision variables (typically with finite domains) and a set of constraints that express relations among the…
We show that several constraint propagation algorithms (also called (local) consistency, consistency enforcing, Waltz, filtering or narrowing algorithms) are instances of algorithms that deal with chaotic iteration. To this end we propose a…
Bound propagation is an important Artificial Intelligence technique used in Constraint Programming tools to deal with numerical constraints. It is typically embedded within a search procedure ("branch and prune") and used at every node of…
Special-purpose constraint propagation algorithms frequently make implicit use of short supports -- by examining a subset of the variables, they can infer support (a justification that a variable-value pair may still form part of an…
Constraint propagation is one of the techniques central to the success of constraint programming. To reduce search, fast algorithms associated with each constraint prune the domains of variables. With global (or non-binary) constraints, the…
Survey Propagation is an algorithm designed for solving typical instances of random constraint satisfiability problems. It has been successfully tested on random 3-SAT and random $G(n,\frac{c}{n})$ graph 3-coloring, in the hard region of…
We describe the use of array expressions as constraints, which represents a consequent generalisation of the "element" constraint. Constraint propagation for array constraints is studied theoretically, and for a set of domain reduction…
This paper presents a model and implementation techniques for speeding up constraint propagation. Three fundamental approaches to improving constraint propagation based on propagators as implementations of constraints are explored: keeping…
We show that some common and important global constraints like ALL-DIFFERENT and GCC can be decomposed into simple arithmetic constraints on which we achieve bound or range consistency, and in some cases even greater pruning. These…
Distributed abstract programs are a novel class of distributed optimization problems where (i) the number of variables is much smaller than the number of constraints and (ii) each constraint is associated to a network node. Abstract…
We discuss here constraint programming (CP) by using a proof-theoretic perspective. To this end we identify three levels of abstraction. Each level sheds light on the essence of CP. In particular, the highest level allows us to bring CP…
Constraint propagation algorithms implement logical inference. For efficiency, it is essential to control whether and in what order basic inference steps are taken. We provide a high-level framework that clearly differentiates between…
Constraint programming (CP) has been used with great success to tackle a wide variety of constraint satisfaction problems which are computationally intractable in general. Global constraints are one of the important factors behind the…
Large optimization problems with hard constraints arise in many settings, yet classical solvers are often prohibitively slow, motivating the use of deep networks as cheap "approximate solvers." Unfortunately, naive deep learning approaches…
Constraints over finite sequences of variables are ubiquitous in sequencing and timetabling. Moreover, the wide variety of such constraints in practical applications led to general modelling techniques and generic propagation algorithms,…
Motivation: Similarity-measure based clustering is a crucial problem appearing throughout scientific data analysis. Recently, a powerful new algorithm called Affinity Propagation (AP) based on message-passing techniques was proposed by Frey…
Numerical analysis has no satisfactory method for the more realistic optimization models. However, with constraint programming one can compute a cover for the solution set to arbitrarily close approximation. Because the use of constraint…
Constraints that may be obtained by composition from simpler constraints are present, in some way or another, in almost every constraint program. The decomposition of such constraints is a standard technique for obtaining an adequate…