On Broken Triangles (IJCAI 2016)

Martin Cooper (1, 2) , Achref El Mouelhi (3, 4) , Cyril Terrioux (3, 4) , Bruno Zanuttini (5)

1 IRIT-ADRIA - Argumentation, Décision, Raisonnement, Incertitude et Apprentissage
2 UT3 - Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier
3 LSIS - Laboratoire des Sciences de l'Information et des Systèmes
4 COALA - COntraintes, ALgorithmes et Applications
5 Equipe MAD - Laboratoire GREYC - UMR6072

A binary CSP instance satisfying the broken-triangle property (BTP) can be solved in polynomial time. Unfortunately, in practice, few instances satisfy the BTP. We show that a local version of the BTP allows the merging of domain values in binary CSPs, thus providing a novel polynomial-time reduction operation. Experimental trials on benchmark instances demonstrate a significant decrease in instance size for certain classes of problems. We show that BTP-merging can be generalised to instances with constraints of arbitrary arity. A directional version of the general-arity BTP then allows us to extend the BTP tractable class previously defined only for binary CSP.

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Complexité [cs.CC]; Logique en informatique [cs.LO]

Martin Cooper, Achref El Mouelhi, Cyril Terrioux, Bruno Zanuttini. On Broken Triangles (IJCAI 2016). Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2016), International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI); Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Jul 2016, New York City, United States. pp.4135-4139. ⟨hal-01356058⟩