Title
Boosting autonomous search for CSPs via skylines
Abstract
Solving constraint satisfaction problems via constraint programming involves the exploration of a search tree where the potential solutions are distributed. The exploration phase is essentially controlled by an enumeration strategy that decides the order in which variables and values are selected to verify its feasibility. This process is known to be quite important, indeed perfect enumerations can reach a solution without useless explorations. However, selecting good strategies in advance is quite hard as the effects along the search are often unpredictable. Autonomous search addresses this concern by proposing to replace on the fly bad-performing strategies by more promising ones. Strategies are selected from a quality rank which is generated in function of their performance on the current solving process. However, the ranking computation is commonly tuned by an optimizer that negatively impacts the performance of the whole resolution. In this paper, we propose a faster autonomous search approach by integrating a powerful database technique called skyline. This technique allows us to avoid the use of costly rank functions and optimizers, accelerating as a consequence the solving process. We report results where the skyline-based approach clearly competes with previously reported autonomous search frameworks as well as with classic and more sophisticated heuristics such as impact-based search and dom / wdeg .
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1016/j.ins.2015.01.035
Inf. Sci.
Keywords
Field
DocType
combinatorial optimization,constraint satisfaction,hyperheuristic,skyline
Skyline,Constraint satisfaction,Mathematical optimization,Ranking,Constraint programming,Constraint satisfaction problem,Combinatorial optimization,Heuristics,Artificial intelligence,Mathematics,Machine learning,Search tree
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
308
C
0020-0255
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.78
26
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ricardo Soto119447.59
Broderick Crawford244673.74
Wenceslao Palma3685.92
Karin Galleguillos480.78
Carlos Castro525529.05
Eric Monfroy657963.05
Franklin Johnson7384.72
Fernando Paredes823027.21