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Experimental evaluation of preprocessing algorithms for constraint satisfaction problems
This paper presents an experimental evaluation of two orthogonal schemes for preprocessing constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). The first of these schemes involves a class of local consistency techniques that includes directional arc consistency, directional path consistency, and adaptive consistency. The other scheme concerns the prearrangement of variables in a linear order to facilitate an efficient search. In the first series of experiments, we evaluated the effect of each of the local consistency techniques on backtracking and its common enhancement, backjumping. Surprizingly, although adaptive consistency has the best worst-case complexity bounds, we have found that it exhibits the worst performance, unless the constraint graph was very sparse. Directional arc consistency (followed by either backjumping or backtracking) and backjumping (without any pre-processing) outperformed all other techniques; moreover, the former dominated the latter in computationally intensive situations. The second series of experiments suggests that maximum cardinality and minimum width arc the best pre-ordering (i.e., static ordering) strategies, while dynamic search rearrangement is superior to all the preorderings studied
Symmetry Breaking for Answer Set Programming
In the context of answer set programming, this work investigates symmetry
detection and symmetry breaking to eliminate symmetric parts of the search
space and, thereby, simplify the solution process. We contribute a reduction of
symmetry detection to a graph automorphism problem which allows to extract
symmetries of a logic program from the symmetries of the constructed coloured
graph. We also propose an encoding of symmetry-breaking constraints in terms of
permutation cycles and use only generators in this process which implicitly
represent symmetries and always with exponential compression. These ideas are
formulated as preprocessing and implemented in a completely automated flow that
first detects symmetries from a given answer set program, adds
symmetry-breaking constraints, and can be applied to any existing answer set
solver. We demonstrate computational impact on benchmarks versus direct
application of the solver.
Furthermore, we explore symmetry breaking for answer set programming in two
domains: first, constraint answer set programming as a novel approach to
represent and solve constraint satisfaction problems, and second, distributed
nonmonotonic multi-context systems. In particular, we formulate a
translation-based approach to constraint answer set solving which allows for
the application of our symmetry detection and symmetry breaking methods. To
compare their performance with a-priori symmetry breaking techniques, we also
contribute a decomposition of the global value precedence constraint that
enforces domain consistency on the original constraint via the unit-propagation
of an answer set solver. We evaluate both options in an empirical analysis. In
the context of distributed nonmonotonic multi-context system, we develop an
algorithm for distributed symmetry detection and also carry over
symmetry-breaking constraints for distributed answer set programming.Comment: Diploma thesis. Vienna University of Technology, August 201
Constraint Programming viewed as Rule-based Programming
We study here a natural situation when constraint programming can be entirely
reduced to rule-based programming. To this end we explain first how one can
compute on constraint satisfaction problems using rules represented by simple
first-order formulas. Then we consider constraint satisfaction problems that
are based on predefined, explicitly given constraints. To solve them we first
derive rules from these explicitly given constraints and limit the computation
process to a repeated application of these rules, combined with labeling.We
consider here two types of rules. The first type, that we call equality rules,
leads to a new notion of local consistency, called {\em rule consistency} that
turns out to be weaker than arc consistency for constraints of arbitrary arity
(called hyper-arc consistency in \cite{MS98b}). For Boolean constraints rule
consistency coincides with the closure under the well-known propagation rules
for Boolean constraints. The second type of rules, that we call membership
rules, yields a rule-based characterization of arc consistency. To show
feasibility of this rule-based approach to constraint programming we show how
both types of rules can be automatically generated, as {\tt CHR} rules of
\cite{fruhwirth-constraint-95}. This yields an implementation of this approach
to programming by means of constraint logic programming. We illustrate the
usefulness of this approach to constraint programming by discussing various
examples, including Boolean constraints, two typical examples of many valued
logics, constraints dealing with Waltz's language for describing polyhedral
scenes, and Allen's qualitative approach to temporal logic.Comment: 39 pages. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
Journa
Metamodel-based model conformance and multiview consistency checking
Model-driven development, using languages such as UML and BON, often makes use of multiple diagrams (e.g., class and sequence diagrams) when modeling systems. These diagrams, presenting different views of a system of interest, may be inconsistent. A metamodel provides a unifying framework in which to ensure and check consistency, while at the same time providing the means to distinguish between valid and invalid models, that is, conformance. Two formal specifications of the metamodel for an object-oriented modeling language are presented, and it is shown how to use these specifications for model conformance and multiview consistency checking. Comparisons are made in terms of completeness and the level of automation each provide for checking multiview consistency and model conformance. The lessons learned from applying formal techniques to the problems of metamodeling, model conformance, and multiview consistency checking are summarized
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