Exploiting Short Supports for Generalised Arc Consistency for Arbitrary Constraints

Nightingale, Peter; Gent, Ian P.; Jefferson, Christopher; Miguel, Ian

doi:10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-111

Exploiting Short Supports for Generalised Arc Consistency for Arbitrary Constraints

Peter Nightingale, Ian P. Gent, Christopher Jefferson, Ian Miguel

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Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Pages 623-627.

https://doi.org/10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-111

Abstract

Special-purpose constraint propagation algorithms (such as those for the element constraint) frequently make implicit use of short supports — by examining a subset of the variables, they can infer support for all other variables and values and save substantial work. However, to date general purpose propagation algorithms (such as GAC-Schema) rely upon supports involving all variables. We demonstrate how to employ short supports in a new general purpose propagation algorithm called ShortGAC. This works when provided with either an explicit list of allowed short tuples, or a function to calculate the next supporting short tuple. Empirical analyses demonstrate the efficiency of ShortGAC compared to other general-purpose propagation algorithms. In some cases ShortGAC even exhibits similar performance to special-purpose propagators.

Peter Nightingale, Ian P. Gent, Christopher Jefferson, and Ian Miguel. 2011. Exploiting Short Supports for Generalised Arc Consistency for Arbitrary Constraints. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-11. IJCAI, 623–627. https://doi.org/10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-111

@inproceedings{ijcai2011p111,
  title     = {Exploiting Short Supports for Generalised Arc Consistency for Arbitrary Constraints},
  author    = {Nightingale, Peter and Gent, Ian P. and Jefferson, Christopher and Miguel, Ian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-11}},
  publisher = {AAAI Press/International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence},
  editor    = {Toby Walsh},
  pages     = {623--627},
  year      = {2011},
  month     = {7},
  doi       = {10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-111},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-111},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Exploiting Short Supports for Generalised Arc Consistency for Arbitrary Constraints
AU  - Nightingale, Peter
AU  - Gent, Ian P.
AU  - Jefferson, Christopher
AU  - Miguel, Ian
T2  - Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-11
PB  - AAAI Press/International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence
PY  - 2011
SP  - 623
EP  - 627
DO  - 10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-111
UR  - https://doi.org/10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-111
ER  -