A First Practical Algorithm for High Levels of Relational Consistency

Authors

Shant Karakashian, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Robert J. Woodward, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Christopher Reesons, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Berthe Y. Choueiry, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Christian Bessiere, University of MontpellierFollow

Date of this Version

Summer 7-2010

Comments

Presented at AAAI 2010: Twenty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, July 11–15, 2010. Copyright 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org).

Abstract

Consistency properties and algorithms for achieving them are at the heart of the success of Constraint Programming. In this paper, we study the relational consistency property R(∗,m)C, which is equivalent to m-wise consistency proposed in relational databases. We also define wR(∗,m)C, a weaker variant of this property. We propose an algorithm for enforcing these properties on a Constraint Satisfaction Problem by tightening the existing relations and without introducing new ones. We empirically show that wR(∗,m)C solves in a backtrack-free manner all the instances of some CSP benchmark classes, thus hinting at the tractability of those classes.