Variable Elimination in Binary CSP via Forbidden Patterns

Davis Cohen (1) , Martin Cooper (2, 3) , Guillaume Escamocher (4) , Stanislas Zivny (5)

1 RHUL - Royal Holloway [University of London]
2 IRIT-ADRIA - Argumentation, Décision, Raisonnement, Incertitude et Apprentissage
3 UT3 - Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier
4 IRIT - Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse
5 University of Warwick [Coventry]

A variable elimination rule allows the polynomialtime identification of certain variables whose elimination does not affect the satisfiability of an instance. Variable elimination in the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) can be used in preprocessing or during search to reduce search space size. We show that there are essentially just four variable elimination rules defined by forbidding generic sub-instances, known as irreducible patterns, in arc-consistent CSP instances. One of these rules is the Broken Triangle Property, whereas the other three are novel.

Mots clés: Constraint satisfaction; Forbidden pattern; Tractability; Arc consistency

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Apprentissage [cs.LG]; Logique en informatique [cs.LO]; Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Davis Cohen, Martin Cooper, Guillaume Escamocher, Stanislas Zivny. Variable Elimination in Binary CSP via Forbidden Patterns. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence - IJCAI 2013, Aug 2013, Beijing, China. pp. 517-523. ⟨hal-01141616⟩