Relational Neighborhood Inverse Consistency for Constraint Satisfaction

Authors

Robert J. Woodward, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Shant Karakashian, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Berthe Y. Choueiry, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Christian Bessiere, University of Montpellier, FranceFollow

Date of this Version

10-2011

Comments

Technical Report UNL-CSE-2011-0007

Constraint Systems Laboratory
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA

Abstract

Freuder and Elfe [1996] introduced Neighborhood Inverse Consistency (NIC) as a new local consistency property for Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) that filters the domains of variables. Two advantages of the algorithm for enforcing NIC is that it automatically adapts its filtering power to the local connectivity of the network and has insignificant space overhead. In this document, we discuss Relational Neighborhood Inverse Consistency (RNIC), which is an extension of NIC to filter relations introduced in [Woodward et al., 2011a], how we enhance the propagation effectiveness by reformulating the dual graph of the CSP. We also describe an automated selection policy that outperforms all approaches in a statistically significant manner.