5,757 research outputs found
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
The complexity of global cardinality constraints
In a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) the goal is to find an assignment
of a given set of variables subject to specified constraints. A global
cardinality constraint is an additional requirement that prescribes how many
variables must be assigned a certain value. We study the complexity of the
problem CCSP(G), the constraint satisfaction problem with global cardinality
constraints that allows only relations from the set G. The main result of this
paper characterizes sets G that give rise to problems solvable in polynomial
time, and states that the remaining such problems are NP-complete
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-
Parameterized Complexity Results for General Factors in Bipartite Graphs with an Application to Constraint Programming
The NP-hard general factor problem asks, given a graph and for each vertex a
list of integers, whether the graph has a spanning subgraph where each vertex
has a degree that belongs to its assigned list. The problem remains NP-hard
even if the given graph is bipartite with partition U+V, and each vertex in U
is assigned the list {1}; this subproblem appears in the context of constraint
programming as the consistency problem for the extended global cardinality
constraint. We show that this subproblem is fixed-parameter tractable when
parameterized by the size of the second partite set V. More generally, we show
that the general factor problem for bipartite graphs, parameterized by |V|, is
fixed-parameter tractable as long as all vertices in U are assigned lists of
length 1, but becomes W[1]-hard if vertices in U are assigned lists of length
at most 2. We establish fixed-parameter tractability by reducing the problem
instance to a bounded number of acyclic instances, each of which can be solved
in polynomial time by dynamic programming.Comment: Full version of a paper that appeared in preliminary form in the
proceedings of IPEC'1
The Complexity of Surjective Homomorphism Problems -- a Survey
We survey known results about the complexity of surjective homomorphism
problems, studied in the context of related problems in the literature such as
list homomorphism, retraction and compaction. In comparison with these
problems, surjective homomorphism problems seem to be harder to classify and we
examine especially three concrete problems that have arisen from the
literature, two of which remain of open complexity
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
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