19,869 research outputs found
Structural Decompositions for Problems with Global Constraints
A wide range of problems can be modelled as constraint satisfaction problems
(CSPs), that is, a set of constraints that must be satisfied simultaneously.
Constraints can either be represented extensionally, by explicitly listing
allowed combinations of values, or implicitly, by special-purpose algorithms
provided by a solver.
Such implicitly represented constraints, known as global constraints, are
widely used; indeed, they are one of the key reasons for the success of
constraint programming in solving real-world problems. In recent years, a
variety of restrictions on the structure of CSP instances have been shown to
yield tractable classes of CSPs. However, most such restrictions fail to
guarantee tractability for CSPs with global constraints. We therefore study the
applicability of structural restrictions to instances with such constraints.
We show that when the number of solutions to a CSP instance is bounded in key
parts of the problem, structural restrictions can be used to derive new
tractable classes. Furthermore, we show that this result extends to
combinations of instances drawn from known tractable classes, as well as to CSP
instances where constraints assign costs to satisfying assignments.Comment: The final publication is available at Springer via
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10601-015-9181-
On tree-preserving constraints
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. Tree convex constraints are extensions of the well-known row convex constraints. Just like the latter, every path-consistent tree convex constraint network is globally consistent. This paper studies and compares three subclasses of tree convex constraints which are called chain-, path- and tree-preserving constraints respectively. While the tractability of the subclass of chain-preserving constraints has been established before, this paper shows that every chain- or path-preserving constraint network is in essence the disjoint union of several independent connected row convex constraint networks, and hence (re-)establish the tractability of these two subclasses of tree convex constraints. We further prove that, when enforcing arc- and path-consistency on a tree-preserving constraint network, in each step, the network remains tree-preserving. This ensures the global consistency of the tree-preserving network if no inconsistency is detected. Moreover, it also guarantees the applicability of the partial path-consistency algorithm to tree-preserving constraint networks, which is usually more efficient than the path-consistency algorithm for large sparse networks. As an application, we show that the class of treepreserving constraints is useful in solving the scene labelling problem
Tractable Combinations of Global Constraints
We study the complexity of constraint satisfaction problems involving global
constraints, i.e., special-purpose constraints provided by a solver and
represented implicitly by a parametrised algorithm. Such constraints are widely
used; indeed, they are one of the key reasons for the success of constraint
programming in solving real-world problems.
Previous work has focused on the development of efficient propagators for
individual constraints. In this paper, we identify a new tractable class of
constraint problems involving global constraints of unbounded arity. To do so,
we combine structural restrictions with the observation that some important
types of global constraint do not distinguish between large classes of
equivalent solutions.Comment: To appear in proceedings of CP'13, LNCS 8124. arXiv admin note: text
overlap with arXiv:1307.179
Hybrid tractability of soft constraint problems
The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a central generic problem in
computer science and artificial intelligence: it provides a common framework
for many theoretical problems as well as for many real-life applications. Soft
constraint problems are a generalisation of the CSP which allow the user to
model optimisation problems. Considerable effort has been made in identifying
properties which ensure tractability in such problems. In this work, we
initiate the study of hybrid tractability of soft constraint problems; that is,
properties which guarantee tractability of the given soft constraint problem,
but which do not depend only on the underlying structure of the instance (such
as being tree-structured) or only on the types of soft constraints in the
instance (such as submodularity). We present several novel hybrid classes of
soft constraint problems, which include a machine scheduling problem,
constraint problems of arbitrary arities with no overlapping nogoods, and the
SoftAllDiff constraint with arbitrary unary soft constraints. An important tool
in our investigation will be the notion of forbidden substructures.Comment: A full version of a CP'10 paper, 26 page
Power and Channel Allocation for Non-orthogonal Multiple Access in 5G Systems: Tractability and Computation
Network capacity calls for significant increase for 5G cellular systems. A
promising multi-user access scheme, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) with
successive interference cancellation (SIC), is currently under consideration.
In NOMA, spectrum efficiency is improved by allowing more than one user to
simultaneously access the same frequency-time resource and separating
multi-user signals by SIC at the receiver. These render resource allocation and
optimization in NOMA different from orthogonal multiple access in 4G. In this
paper, we provide theoretical insights and algorithmic solutions to jointly
optimize power and channel allocation in NOMA. For utility maximization, we
mathematically formulate NOMA resource allocation problems. We characterize and
analyze the problems' tractability under a range of constraints and utility
functions. For tractable cases, we provide polynomial-time solutions for global
optimality. For intractable cases, we prove the NP-hardness and propose an
algorithmic framework combining Lagrangian duality and dynamic programming
(LDDP) to deliver near-optimal solutions. To gauge the performance of the
obtained solutions, we also provide optimality bounds on the global optimum.
Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithmic solution can
significantly improve the system performance in both throughput and fairness
over orthogonal multiple access as well as over a previous NOMA resource
allocation scheme.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, revisio
The complexity of Boolean surjective general-valued CSPs
Valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSPs) are discrete optimisation
problems with a -valued objective function given as
a sum of fixed-arity functions. In Boolean surjective VCSPs, variables take on
labels from and an optimal assignment is required to use both
labels from . Examples include the classical global Min-Cut problem in
graphs and the Minimum Distance problem studied in coding theory.
We establish a dichotomy theorem and thus give a complete complexity
classification of Boolean surjective VCSPs with respect to exact solvability.
Our work generalises the dichotomy for -valued constraint
languages (corresponding to surjective decision CSPs) obtained by Creignou and
H\'ebrard. For the maximisation problem of -valued
surjective VCSPs, we also establish a dichotomy theorem with respect to
approximability.
Unlike in the case of Boolean surjective (decision) CSPs, there appears a
novel tractable class of languages that is trivial in the non-surjective
setting. This newly discovered tractable class has an interesting mathematical
structure related to downsets and upsets. Our main contribution is identifying
this class and proving that it lies on the borderline of tractability. A
crucial part of our proof is a polynomial-time algorithm for enumerating all
near-optimal solutions to a generalised Min-Cut problem, which might be of
independent interest.Comment: v5: small corrections and improved presentatio
Structurally Tractable Uncertain Data
Many data management applications must deal with data which is uncertain,
incomplete, or noisy. However, on existing uncertain data representations, we
cannot tractably perform the important query evaluation tasks of determining
query possibility, certainty, or probability: these problems are hard on
arbitrary uncertain input instances. We thus ask whether we could restrict the
structure of uncertain data so as to guarantee the tractability of exact query
evaluation. We present our tractability results for tree and tree-like
uncertain data, and a vision for probabilistic rule reasoning. We also study
uncertainty about order, proposing a suitable representation, and study
uncertain data conditioned by additional observations.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. To appear in SIGMOD/PODS PhD Symposium
201
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