Self-decomposable Global Constraints

International audienceScalability becomes more and more critical to decision support technologies. In order to address this issue in Constraint Programming, we introduce the family of self-decomposable constraints. These constraints can be satisfied by applying their own filtering algorithms on variable subsets only. We introduce a generic framework which dynamically decompose propagation, by filtering over variable subsets. Our experiments over the CUMULATIVE constraint illustrate the practical relevance of self-decomposition

Contractibility and Contractible Approximations of Soft Global Constraints

We study contractibility and its approximation for two very general classes of soft global constraints. We introduce a general formulation of decomposition-based soft constraints and provide a sufficient condition for contractibility and an approach to approximation. For edit-based soft constraints, we establish that the tightest contractible approximation cannot be expressed in edit-based terms, in general

Global constraints in distributed constraint satisfaction and optimization

Global constraints are an essential component in the efficiency of centralized constraint programming. We propose to include global constraints in distributed constraint satisfaction problem (DisCSP) and distributed constraint optimization problem (DCOP). We detail how this inclusion can be done, considering different representations for global constraints (direct, nested, binary). We explore the relation of global constraints with local consistency (both in the hard and soft cases), in particular, for generalized arc consistency (GAC). We provide experimental evidence of the benefits of global constraints on several benchmarks, both for distributed constraint satisfaction and for distributed constraint optimization. © 2013 The Author.2009-SGR-1434; Generalitat de CatalunyaPeer Reviewe

Global Constraint Catalog, 2nd Edition

This report presents a catalogue of global constraints where each constraint is explicitly described in terms of graph properties and/or automata and/or first order logical formulae with arithmetic. When available, it also presents some typical usage as well as some pointers to existing filtering algorithms

Global Constraint Catalog, 2nd Edition (revision a)

This report presents a catalogue of global constraints where each constraint is explicitly described in terms of graph properties and/or automata and/or first order logical formulae with arithmetic. When available, it also presents some typical usage as well as some pointers to existing filtering algorithms