The Power of Arc Consistency for CSPs Defined by Partially-Ordered Forbidden Patterns

Characterising tractable fragments of the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is an important challenge in theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Forbidding patterns (generic sub-instances) provides a means of defining CSP fragments which are neither exclusively language-based n...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science pp. 652 - 661
Main Authors: Cooper, Martin C., Živný, Stanislav
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 05.07.2016
Series:ACM Conferences
Subjects:
Theory of computation > Logic
Theory of computation > Models of computation > Computability
constraint satisfaction problem
forbidden pattern
tractability
arc consistency
ISBN:9781450343916, 1450343910
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Characterising tractable fragments of the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is an important challenge in theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Forbidding patterns (generic sub-instances) provides a means of defining CSP fragments which are neither exclusively language-based nor exclusively structure-based. It is known that the class of binary CSP instances in which the broken-triangle pattern (BTP) does not occur, a class which includes all tree-structured instances, are decided by arc consistency (AC), a ubiquitous reduction operation in constraint solvers. We provide a characterisation of simple partially-ordered forbidden patterns which have this AC-solvability property. It turns out that BTP is just one of five such AC-solvable patterns. The four other patterns allow us to exhibit new tractable classes.
ISBN:9781450343916
1450343910
DOI:10.1145/2933575.2933587