Weighted Constraint Satisfaction Problems with Min-Max Quantifiers

  • Authors:
  • Jimmy H. M. Lee;Terrence W. K. Mak;Justin Yip

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ICTAI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Soft constraints are functions returning costs, and are essential in modeling over-constrained and optimization problems. We are interested in tackling soft constrained problems with adversarial conditions. Aiming at generalizing the weighted and quantified constraint satisfaction frameworks, a Quantified Weighted Constraint Satisfaction Problem (QWCSP) consists of a set of finite domain variables, a set of soft constraints, and a min or max quantifier associated with each of these variables. We formally define QWCSP, and propose a complete solver which is based on alpha-beta pruning. QWCSPs are useful special cases of QCOP/QCOP+, and can be solved as a QCOP/QCOP+. Restricting our attention to only QWCSPs, we show empirically that our proposed solving techniques can better exploit problem characteristics than those developed for QCOP/QCOP+. Experimental results confirm the feasibility and efficiency of our proposals.