Abstract
Efficient constraint propagation is crucial to any constraint solver. We show that watched literals, already a great success in the satisfiability community, can be used to provide highly efficient implementations of constraint propagators. We describe three important aspects of watched literals as we apply them to constraints, and how they are implemented in the Minion constraint solver. We show three successful applications of to constraint propagators: the sum of Boolean variables; GAC for the ‘element’ constraint; and GAC for the ‘table’ constraint.
Ian Miguel is supported by a UK Royal Academy of Engineering/EPSRC Fellowship. This research was supported by EPSRC Grants GR/S30580 and EP/D032636 and the EPSRC funded SymNET. We thank Peter Jeavons, Steve Linton, Iñes Lynce, Angela Miguel, Karen Petrie, Judith Underwood, and our CP reviewers.
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Gent, I.P., Jefferson, C., Miguel, I. (2006). Watched Literals for Constraint Propagation in Minion. In: Benhamou, F. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming - CP 2006. CP 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4204. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11889205_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11889205_15
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