Compact Modeling in Constraint Programming with Hybrid Tables

Lecoutre, Christophe; Samy Modeliar, Mouny; Audemard, Gilles; Paris, Nicolas; Szczepanski, Nicolas

doi:10.24963/ijcai.2026/255

Compact Modeling in Constraint Programming with Hybrid Tables

Christophe Lecoutre, Mouny Samy Modeliar, Gilles Audemard, Nicolas Paris, Nicolas Szczepanski

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Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Main Track. Pages 2291-2299.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/255

Keywords

Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Modeling
Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Constraint optimization problems
Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Constraint satisfaction
Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Constraint programming

Abstract

Hybrid tables, also referred to as `smart' in the literature, represent a valuable modeling technique within Constraint Programming (CP). These tables allow us to handle disjunctive cases (constraining expressions) in a compact and structured way, by authorizing tuples (table entries) to contain simple unary and binary arithmetic restrictions (similar to internal constraints).

In this paper, we show the practical interest of using hybrid tables for planning-like combinatorial puzzles, when the transition from one state to the next can be encoded by a single hybrid table.

Experimental results show that these hybrid models exhibit greater compactness and efficiency in solving compared to their conventional counterparts.

Christophe Lecoutre, Mouny Samy Modeliar, Gilles Audemard, Nicolas Paris, and Nicolas Szczepanski. 2026. Compact Modeling in Constraint Programming with Hybrid Tables. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-26. IJCAI, 2291–2299. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/255

@inproceedings{ijcai2026p255,
  title     = {Compact Modeling in Constraint Programming with Hybrid Tables},
  author    = {Lecoutre, Christophe and Samy Modeliar, Mouny and Audemard, Gilles and Paris, Nicolas and Szczepanski, Nicolas},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-26}},
  publisher = {International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization},
  editor    = {Diego Calvanese},
  pages     = {2291--2299},
  year      = {2026},
  month     = {8},
  note      = {Main Track},
  doi       = {10.24963/ijcai.2026/255},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/255},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Compact Modeling in Constraint Programming with Hybrid Tables
AU  - Lecoutre, Christophe
AU  - Samy Modeliar, Mouny
AU  - Audemard, Gilles
AU  - Paris, Nicolas
AU  - Szczepanski, Nicolas
T2  - Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-26
PB  - International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization
PY  - 2026
SP  - 2291
EP  - 2299
DO  - 10.24963/ijcai.2026/255
UR  - https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/255
ER  -