Work

Virtual arc consistency for weighted CSP

Year: 2008

Type: preprint

Abstract: Optimizing a combination of local cost functions on dis-crete variables is a central problem in many formalisms such as in probabilistic networks, maximum satisfiabil-ity, weighted CSP or factor graphs. Recent results have shown that maintaining a form of local consistency in a Branch and Bound search provides bounds that are strong enough to solve many practical instances. In this paper, we introduce Virtual Arc Consistency (VAC) which iteratively identifies and applies se-quences of cost propagation over rational costs that are guaranteed to transform a WCSP in another WCSP with an improved constant cost. Although not as strong as Optimal Soft Arc Consistency, VAC is faster and power-ful enough to solve submodular problems. Maintaining VAC inside branch and bound leads to important im-provements in efficiency on large difficult problems and allowed us to close two famous frequency assignment problem instances.

Authors: Martin Cooper, Simon de Givry, Martí Sánchez-Fibla, Thomas Schiex, Matthias Zytnicki

Institutions: Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, Institut National de Recherche pour l'Agriculture, l'Alimentation et l'Environnement, Ressources génomique-info

Language: French

Topic: Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W132900507

Cites: 19

Cited by: 48

Related to: 10