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31
Optimization of simple tabular reduction for table constraints
- In Proceedings of CP’08
, 2008
"... Abstract. Table constraints play an important role within constraint programming. Recently, many schemes or algorithms have been proposed to propagate table constraints or/and to compress their representation. We show that simple tabular reduction (STR), a technique proposed by J. Ullmann to dynamic ..."
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Cited by 25 (11 self)
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Abstract. Table constraints play an important role within constraint programming. Recently, many schemes or algorithms have been proposed to propagate table constraints or/and to compress their representation. We show that simple tabular reduction (STR), a technique proposed by J. Ullmann to dynamically maintain the tables of supports, is very often the most efficient practical approach to enforce generalized arc consistency within MAC. We also describe an optimization of STR which allows limiting the number of operations related to validity checking or search of supports. Interestingly enough, this optimization makes STR potentially r times faster where r is the arity of the constraint(s). The results of an extensive experimentation that we have conducted with respect to random and structured instances indicate that the optimized algorithm we propose is usually around twice as fast as the original STR and can be up to one order of magnitude faster than previous state-of-the-art algorithms on some series of instances. 1
GENERALISED ARC CONSISTENCY FOR THE ALLDIFFERENT CONSTRAINT: AN EMPIRICAL SURVEY
"... The AllDifferent constraint is a crucial component of any constraint toolkit, language or solver, since it is very widely used in a variety of constraint models. The literature contains many different versions of this constraint, which trade strength of inference against computational cost. In thi ..."
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Cited by 16 (8 self)
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The AllDifferent constraint is a crucial component of any constraint toolkit, language or solver, since it is very widely used in a variety of constraint models. The literature contains many different versions of this constraint, which trade strength of inference against computational cost. In this paper, we focus on the highest strength of inference, enforcing a property known as generalised arc consistency (GAC). This work is an analytical survey of optimizations of the main algorithm for GAC for the AllDifferent constraint. We evaluate empirically a number of key techniques from the literature. We also report important implementation details of those techniques, which have often not been described in published papers. We pay particular attention to improving incrementality by exploiting the strongly-connected components discovered during the standard propagation process, since this has not been detailed before. Our empirical work represents by far the most extensive set of experiments on variants of GAC algorithms for AllDifferent. Overall, the best combination of optimizations gives a mean speedup of 168 times over the same implementation without the optimizations.
Lazy explanations for constraint propagator
, 2010
"... Abstract Explanations are a technique for reasoning about constraint propagation, which have been applied in many learning, backjumping and user-interaction algorithms for constraint programming. To date ex-planations for constraints have usually been recorded eagerly when con-straint propagation h ..."
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Cited by 8 (6 self)
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Abstract Explanations are a technique for reasoning about constraint propagation, which have been applied in many learning, backjumping and user-interaction algorithms for constraint programming. To date ex-planations for constraints have usually been recorded eagerly when con-straint propagation happens, which leads to inefficient use of time and space, because many will never be used. In this paper we show that it is possible and highly effective to calculate explanations retrospectively when they are needed. To this end, we implement lazy explanations in a state of the art learning framework. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the technique: we achieve reduction in the number of explanations calculated up to a factor of 200 and reductions in overall solve time up to a factor of 5. Key words: constraint programming, explanations, learning 1
Global constraints: A survey
- IN
, 2011
"... Constraint programming (CP) is mainly based on filtering algorithms; their association with global constraints is one of the main strengths of CP because they exploit the specific structure of each constraint. This chapter is an overview of these two techniques. A collection of the most frequently u ..."
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Cited by 7 (1 self)
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Constraint programming (CP) is mainly based on filtering algorithms; their association with global constraints is one of the main strengths of CP because they exploit the specific structure of each constraint. This chapter is an overview of these two techniques. A collection of the most frequently used global constraints is given and some filtering algorithms are detailed. In addition, we try to identify how filtering algorithms can be designed. At last, we identify some problems that deserve to be addressed in the future.
Abscon 112 Toward more Robustness
"... Abstract. This paper describes the three main improvements made to the solver Abscon 109 [9]. The new version, Abscon 112, is able to automatically break some variable symmetries, infer allDifferent constraints from cliques of variables that are pair-wise irreflexive, and use an optimized version of ..."
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Cited by 6 (0 self)
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Abstract. This paper describes the three main improvements made to the solver Abscon 109 [9]. The new version, Abscon 112, is able to automatically break some variable symmetries, infer allDifferent constraints from cliques of variables that are pair-wise irreflexive, and use an optimized version of the STR (Simple Tabular Reduction) technique initially introduced by J. Ullmann for table constraints. 1 From Local to Global Variable Symmetries In [10], we have proposed to automatically detect variable symmetries of CSP instances by computing for each constraint scope a partition exhibiting locally symmetrical variables. From this local information that can be obtained in polynomial time, we can build a so-called lsv-graph whose automorphisms correspond to (global) variable symmetries. Interestingly enough, our approach allows us to disregard the representation (extension, intension, global) of constraints. Besides, the size of the lsv-graph is linear wrt the number of constraints (and their arity). To break symmetries from the generators returned by a graph automorphism
A Path-Optimal GAC Algorithm for Table Constraints
- 20TH EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (ECAI'12), FRANCE
, 2012
"... Filtering by Generalized Arc Consistency (GAC) is a fundamental technique in Constraint Programming. Recent advances in GAC algorithms for extensional constraints rely on direct manipulation of tables during search. Simple Tabular Reduction (STR), which systematically removes invalid tuples from ta ..."
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Cited by 6 (2 self)
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Filtering by Generalized Arc Consistency (GAC) is a fundamental technique in Constraint Programming. Recent advances in GAC algorithms for extensional constraints rely on direct manipulation of tables during search. Simple Tabular Reduction (STR), which systematically removes invalid tuples from tables, has been shown to be a simple yet efficient approach. STR2, a refinement of STR, is considered to be among the best filtering algorithms for positive table constraints. In this paper, we introduce a new GAC algorithm called STR3 that is specifically designed to enforce GAC during search. STR3 can completely avoid unnecessary traversal of tables, making it optimal along any path of the search tree. Our experiments show that STR3 is much faster than STR2 when the average size of the tables is not reduced drastically during search.
Atom Mapping with Constraint Programming
"... The mass flow in a chemical reaction network is determined by the propagation of atoms from educt to product molecules within each of the constituent chemical reactions. The Atom Mapping Problem for a given chemical reaction is the computational task of determining the correspondences of the atoms ..."
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Cited by 3 (1 self)
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The mass flow in a chemical reaction network is determined by the propagation of atoms from educt to product molecules within each of the constituent chemical reactions. The Atom Mapping Problem for a given chemical reaction is the computational task of determining the correspondences of the atoms between educt and product molecules. We propose here a Constraint Programming approach to identify atom mappings for “elementary ” reactions. These feature a cyclic imaginary transition state (ITS) imposing an additional strong constraint on the bijection between educt and product atoms. The ongoing work presented here identifies only chemically feasible ITSs by integrating the cyclic structure of the chemical transformation into the search.
Short and Long Supports for Constraint Propagation
"... 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 assignment that satisfies the constraint) for all other variables an ..."
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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 assignment that satisfies the constraint) for all other variables and values and save substantial work – but short supports have not been studied in their own right. The two main contributions of this paper are the identification of short supports as important for constraint propagation, and the introduction of HaggisGAC, an efficient and effective general purpose propagation algorithm for exploiting short supports. Given the complexity of HaggisGAC, we present it as an optimised version of a simpler algorithm ShortGAC. Although experiments demonstrate the efficiency of ShortGAC compared with other general-purpose propagation algorithms where a compact set of short supports is available, we show theoretically and experimentally that HaggisGAC is even better. We also find that HaggisGAC performs better than GAC-Schema on full-length supports. We also introduce a variant algorithm HaggisGAC-Stable, which is adapted to avoid work on backtracking and in some cases can be faster and have significant reductions in memory use. All the proposed algorithms are excellent for propagating disjunctions of constraints. In all experiments with disjunctions we found our algorithms to be faster than Constructive Or and GAC-Schema by at least an order of magnitude, and up to three orders of magnitude. 1.
Encoding Table Constraints in CLP(FD) Based on Pair-wise AC
"... Abstract. We present an implementation of table constraints in CLP(FD). For binary constraints, the supports of each value are represented as a finite-domain variable, and action rules are used to propagate value exclusions. The bit-vector representation of finite domains facilitates constant-time r ..."
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Abstract. We present an implementation of table constraints in CLP(FD). For binary constraints, the supports of each value are represented as a finite-domain variable, and action rules are used to propagate value exclusions. The bit-vector representation of finite domains facilitates constant-time removal of unsupported values. For n-ary constraints, we propose pair-wise arc consistency (AC), which ensures that each value has a support in the domain of every related variable. Pair-wise AC does not require introducing new problem variables as done in binarization methods and allows for compact representation of constraints. Nevertheless, pair-wise AC is weaker than general arc consistency (GAC) in terms of pruning power and requires a final check when a constraint becomes ground. To remedy this weakness, we propose adopting early checks when constraints are sufficiently instantiated. Our experimentation shows that pair-wise AC with early checking is as effective as GAC for positive constraints. 1
Exploiting Short Supports for Generalised Arc Consistency for Arbitrary Constraints
- PROCEEDINGS OF THE TWENTY-SECOND INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
, 2011
"... 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 ..."
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Cited by 3 (3 self)
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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.
