1,259 research outputs found
Certainty Closure: Reliable Constraint Reasoning with Incomplete or Erroneous Data
Constraint Programming (CP) has proved an effective paradigm to model and
solve difficult combinatorial satisfaction and optimisation problems from
disparate domains. Many such problems arising from the commercial world are
permeated by data uncertainty. Existing CP approaches that accommodate
uncertainty are less suited to uncertainty arising due to incomplete and
erroneous data, because they do not build reliable models and solutions
guaranteed to address the user's genuine problem as she perceives it. Other
fields such as reliable computation offer combinations of models and associated
methods to handle these types of uncertain data, but lack an expressive
framework characterising the resolution methodology independently of the model.
We present a unifying framework that extends the CP formalism in both model
and solutions, to tackle ill-defined combinatorial problems with incomplete or
erroneous data. The certainty closure framework brings together modelling and
solving methodologies from different fields into the CP paradigm to provide
reliable and efficient approches for uncertain constraint problems. We
demonstrate the applicability of the framework on a case study in network
diagnosis. We define resolution forms that give generic templates, and their
associated operational semantics, to derive practical solution methods for
reliable solutions.Comment: Revised versio
Certificates of infeasibility via nonsmooth optimization
An important aspect in the solution process of constraint satisfaction
problems is to identify exclusion boxes which are boxes that do not contain
feasible points. This paper presents a certificate of infeasibility for finding
such boxes by solving a linearly constrained nonsmooth optimization problem.
Furthermore, the constructed certificate can be used to enlarge an exclusion
box by solving a nonlinearly constrained nonsmooth optimization problem.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1506.0802
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