Many AI synthesis problems such as planning, scheduling or design may be encoded in a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). A CSP is typically defined as the problem of finding any consistent labeling for a fixed set of variables satisfying all given constraints between these variables. However, for many real tasks, the set of constraints to consider may evolve because of the environment or because of user interactions. The problem we consider here is the solution maintenance problem in such a dynamic CSP (DCSP). We propose a new class of constraint recording algorithms called Nogood Recording that may be used for solving both static and dynamic CSPs. It offers an interesting compromise, polynomially bounded in space, between an ATMS-like approach and the usual static constraint satisfaction algorithms. 1 Introduction The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) model is widely used to represent and solve various AI related problems and provides fundamental tools in areas such as truth...

. This paper describes an algorithm designed to minimally recongure schedules in response to a changing environment. External factors have caused an existing schedule to become invalid, perhaps due to the withdrawal of resources, or because of changes to the set of scheduled activities. The total shift in the start and end times of already scheduled activities should be kept to a minimum. This optimization requirement may be captured using a linear optimization function over linear constraints. However, the disjunctive nature of the resource constraints impairs traditional mathematical programming approaches. The unimodular probing algorithm interleaves constraint programming and linear programming. The linear programming solver handles only a controlled subset of the problem constraints, to guarantee that the values returned are discrete. Using probe backtracking, a complete, repair-based method for search, these values are simply integrated into constraint programming. Unimodular p...

Search algorithms for solving CSP (Constraint Satisfaction Problems) usually fall into one of two main families: local search algorithms and systematic algorithms. Both families have their advantages. Designing hybrid approaches seems promising since those advantages may be combined into a single approach. In this paper, we present a new hybrid technique. It performs a local search over partial assignments instead of complete assignments, and uses filtering techniques and conflict-based techniques to efficiently guide the search. This new technique benefits from both classical approaches: aprioripruning of the search space from filtering-based search and possible repair of early mistakes from local search. We focus on a specific version of this technique: tabu decision-repair.Experiments done on open-shop scheduling problems show that our approach competes well with the best highly specialized algorithms. 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

The hybridisation of systematic and stochastic search is an active research area with potential bene ts for real-world combinatorial problems. This paper shows that randomising the backtracking component of a systematic backtracker can improve its scalability to equal that of stochastic local search. The hybrid may be viewed as stochastic local search in a constrained space, cleanly combining local search with constraint programming techniques. The approach is applied to two very dierent problems. Firstly a hybrid of local search and constraint propagation is applied to hard random 3-SAT problems, and is the rst constructive search algorithm to solve very large instances. Secondly a hybrid of local search and branch-and-bound is applied to low-autocorrelation binary sequences (a notoriously dicult communications engineering problem), and is the rst stochastic search algorithm to nd optimal solutions. These results show that the approach is a promising one for both constraint satisfaction and optimisation problems.

In this paper we consider the solution of scheduling problems that are inherently over-subscribed.

. An important extension of constraint technology involves problems that undergo changes that may invalidate the current solution. Previous work on dynamic problems sought methods for efficiently finding new solutions. We take a more proactive approach, exploring methods for finding solutions more likely to remain valid after changes that temporarily alter the set of valid assignments (stable solutions). To this end, we examine strategies for tracking changes in a problem and incorporating this information to guide search to solutions that are more likely to be stable. In this work search is carried out with a min-conflicts hill climbing procedure, and information about change is used to bias value selection, either by distorting the objective function or by imposing further criteria on selection. We study methods that track either value losses or constraint additions, and incorporate information about relative frequency of change into search. Our experiments show that the...

Heuristic search methods promise to find shortest paths for path-planning problems faster than uninformed search methods. Incremental search methods, on the other hand, promise to find shortest paths for series of similar path-planning problems faster than is possible by solving each path-planning problem from scratch. In this article, we develop Lifelong Planning A * (LPA*), an incremental version of A * that combines ideas from the artificial intelligence and the algorithms literature. It repeatedly finds shortest paths from a given start vertex to a given goal vertex while the edge costs of a graph change or vertices are added or deleted. Its first search is the same as that of a version of A * that breaks ties in favor of vertices with smaller g-values but many of the subsequent searches are potentially faster because it reuses those parts of the previous search tree that are identical to the new one. We present analytical results that demonstrate its similarity to A * and experimental results that demonstrate its potential advantage in two different domains if the path-planning problems change only slightly and the changes are close to the goal.

Introduction We consider a class of resource allocation problems in which a sequence of tasks is presented to a solver, and the solver must nd an assignment for each task when it arrives. There are constraints restricting the assignments that sets of tasks may be given. The global set of possible tasks and their associated constraints is known in advance, but only a subset of them will arrive in a given instance of the problem. The solver may choose to reject some requests. The goal of the solver is to specify an assignment for each task arrival, such that no constraints are violated, while optimising some objective function. The problem class can be used to model a number of dierent scenarios - for example: assigning bookings for repairs and car services in a workshop with limited resources, allocating desks to a series of visiting researchers, assigning deliveries to individual couriers, or deciding upon start times for jobs in a dynamic job-shop. We assume there is uncert

This panel explores issues of systematic and stochastic control in the context of constraint satisfaction. 1

Conventional constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) formulations are static. There is a given set of constraints and variables, and the structure of the constraint graph does not change. For a lot of search problems, though, it is not clear in advance what a solution's constraint graph will look like. To overcome these deficiencies, we introduce the concept of structural constraints, which are restrictions on admissible constraint graphs. The construction of constraint graphs is based on the concept of graph grammars. This allows us to formulate and solve structural constraint satisfaction problems (SCSPs), handling combinatorial search problems without explicitly giving the solution's structure.