A filtering algorithm for constraints of difference in CSPs
AAAI '94 Proceedings of the twelfth national conference on Artificial intelligence (vol. 1)
Boosting combinatorial search through randomization
AAAI '98/IAAI '98 Proceedings of the fifteenth national/tenth conference on Artificial intelligence/Innovative applications of artificial intelligence
New methods to color the vertices of a graph
Communications of the ACM
A Class of Hard Small 0-1 Programs
INFORMS Journal on Computing
Guiding Search using Constraint-level Advice
Proceedings of the 2006 conference on ECAI 2006: 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence August 29 -- September 1, 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy
Using expectation maximization to find likely assignments for solving CSP's
AAAI'07 Proceedings of the 22nd national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
The symmetric alldiff constraint
IJCAI'99 Proceedings of the 16th international joint conference on Artifical intelligence - Volume 1
IJCAI'99 Proceedings of the 16th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
IJCAI'95 Proceedings of the 14th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
Counting solutions of CSPs: a structural approach
IJCAI'05 Proceedings of the 19th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence
The traveling tournament problem with predefined venues
Journal of Scheduling
Sampling strategies and variable selection in weighted degree heuristics
CP'07 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Principles and practice of constraint programming
Counting solutions of knapsack constraints
CPAIOR'08 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Integration of AI and OR techniques in constraint programming for combinatorial optimization problems
Efficient generic search heuristics within the EMBP framework
CP'09 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Principles and practice of constraint programming
Recovering indirect solution densities for counting-based branching heuristics
CPAIOR'11 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Integration of AI and OR techniques in constraint programming for combinatorial optimization problems
Improved algorithm for the soft global cardinality constraint
CPAIOR'06 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems
More robust counting-based search heuristics with alldifferent constraints
CPAIOR'10 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Designing a search heuristic for constraint programming that is reliable across problem domains has been an important research topic in recent years. This paper concentrates on one family of candidates: counting-based search. Such heuristics seek to make branching decisions that preserve most of the solutions by determining what proportion of solutions to each individual constraint agree with that decision. Whereas most generic search heuristics in constraint programming rely on local information at the level of the individual variable, our search heuristics are based on more global information at the constraint level. We design several algorithms that are used to count the number of solutions to specific families of constraints and propose some search heuristics exploiting such information. The experimental part of the paper considers eight problem domains ranging from well-established benchmark puzzles to rostering and sport scheduling. An initial empirical analysis identifies heuristic maxSD as a robust candidate among our proposals. We then evaluate the latter against the state of the art, including the latest generic search heuristics, restarts, and discrepancy-based tree traversals. Experimental results show that counting-based search generally outperforms other generic heuristics.