Title
How efficient is a global constraint in practice?
Abstract
AbstractPropagation is at the very core of t can provide signi: it can provide significant performance boosts as long as the search space reduction is not outweighed by the cost for running the propagators. A lot of research effort in the CP community is directed toward improving this trade-off. While experimental evaluation is here of the greatest importance, there exists no systematic and flexible methodology to measure the exact benefits provided by a given (new) filtering procedure. This work proposes such a framework by relying on replaying search trees to obtain more realistic assessments. Reducing propagation overhead is done chiefly by 1) devising more efficient algorithms or by 2) using on-line control policies to limit the propagator activations, i.e., mechanisms to reduce the number of propagator calls. In both cases, obtaining improvements is a long and demanding process with uncertain outcome. We propose a method to assess the potential gain of both approaches before actually starting the endeavor, providing the community with a tool to best direct the research efforts. In order to visualize benefits of actual global constraints and the potential of their improvement, we suggest the use of performance profiles. Our approach is showcased for well-known global constraints: alldifferent, cumulative, binpacking and unary (with transition times).
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1007/s10601-017-9277-y
Periodicals
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Constraint programming,Propagator,Global constraint,Evaluation,Analysis,AllDifferent,Cumulative,BinPacking,Unary resource,Performance profiles
Journal
23
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1383-7133
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sascha Van Cauwelaert192.80
Michele Lombardi227028.86
Pierre Schaus312724.63