Title
Disjunctions, independence, refinements
Abstract
An important question in constraint satisfaction is how to restrict the problem to ensure tractability (since the general problem is NP-hard). The use of disjunctions has proven to be a useful method for constructing tractable constraint classes from existing classes; the well-known 'max-closed' and 'ORD-Horn' constraints are examples of tractable classes that can be constructed this way. Three sufficient conditions (the guaranteed satisfaction property, 1-independence and 2-independence) that each ensure the tractability of constraints combined by disjunctions have been proposed in the literature. We show that these conditions are both necessary and sufficient for tractability in three different natural classes of disjunctive constraints. This suggests that deciding this kind of property is a very important task when dealing with disjunctive constraints. We provide a simple, automatic method for checking the 1-independence property--this method is applicable whenever the consistency of the constraints under consideration can be decided by path-consistency. Our method builds on a connection between independence and refinements (which is a way of reducing one constraint satisfaction problem to another.)
Year
DOI
Venue
2002
10.1016/S0004-3702(02)00224-2
Artif. Intell.
Keywords
Field
DocType
guaranteed satisfaction property,general problem,tractable constraint class,constraint satisfaction,constraint satisfaction problem,disjunctive constraint,automatic method,important question,1-independence property,useful method
Discrete mathematics,Constraint satisfaction,Mathematical optimization,Local consistency,Constraint (mathematics),Constraint graph,Decomposition method (constraint satisfaction),Constraint satisfaction problem,Constraint satisfaction dual problem,Mathematics,Hybrid algorithm (constraint satisfaction)
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
140
1-2
0004-3702
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.42
17
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mathias Broxvall130125.54
Peter Jonsson270054.04
Jochen Renz3102066.17