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Box-set consistency for interval-based constraint problems

Published: 13 March 2005 Publication History

Abstract

As opposed to finite domain CSPs, arc consistency cannot be enforced, in general, on CSPs over the reals, including very simple instances. In contrast, a stronger property, the so-called box-set consistency, that requires a no-split condition in addition to arc consistency, can be obtained on a much larger number of problems.To obtain this property, we devise a lazy algorithm that combines hull consistency filtering, interval union projection, and intelligent domain splitting. It can be applied to any numerical CSP, and achieves box-set consistency if constraints are redundancy-free in terms of variables. This holds even if the problem is not intervalconvex. The main contribution of our approach lies in the way we bypass the non-convexity issue, which so far was a synonym for either a loss of accuracy or an unbounded growth of label size.We prove the correctness of our algorithm and through experimental results, we show that, as compared to a strategy based on a standard bisection, it may lead to gains while never producing an overhead.

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Cited By

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  • (2014)Using Constraint Programming in Selection Operators for Constraint DatabasesExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2014.04.04741:15(6773-6785)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2014
  • (2008)Efficient interval partitioning-Local search collaboration for constraint satisfactionComputers and Operations Research10.1016/j.cor.2006.08.00335:5(1412-1435)Online publication date: 1-May-2008

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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Applied computing
March 2005
1814 pages
ISBN:1581139640
DOI:10.1145/1066677
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 13 March 2005

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SAC05: The 2005 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
March 13 - 17, 2005
New Mexico, Santa Fe

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Cited By

View all
  • (2014)Using Constraint Programming in Selection Operators for Constraint DatabasesExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2014.04.04741:15(6773-6785)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2014
  • (2008)Efficient interval partitioning-Local search collaboration for constraint satisfactionComputers and Operations Research10.1016/j.cor.2006.08.00335:5(1412-1435)Online publication date: 1-May-2008

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