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An Abstraction Framework for Soft Constraints and Its Relationship with Constraint Propagation

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Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation (SARA 2000)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1864))

Abstract

Soft constraints are very flexible and expressive. However, they also are very complex to handle. For this reason, it may reasonable in several cases to pass to an abstract version of a given soft problem, and then to bring some useful information from the abstract problem to the concrete one. This will hopefully make the search for a solution, or for an optimal solution, of the concrete problem, faster.

In this paper we review the main concepts and properties of our abstraction framework for soft constraints, and we show how it can be used to import constraint propagation algorithms from the abstract scenario to the concrete one. This may be useful when we don’t have any (or any efficient) propagation algorithm in the concrete setting.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Universitá di Pisa, Corso Italia 40, 56125, Pisa, Italy

    Stefano Bistarelli

  2. University of Paris 6, LIP6 case 169, 4, Place Jussieu, 75 252, Paris Cedex 05, France

    Philippe Codognet

  3. Dipartimento di Matematica, Universitá di Padova, Via Belzoni 7, 35131, Padova, Italy

    Francesca Rossi

Authors
  1. Stefano Bistarelli
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  2. Philippe Codognet
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  3. Francesca Rossi
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, 115 Ferguson Hall, Lincoln, NE, 68588-0115

    Berthe Y. Choueiry

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of York, Heslington, York, Y010 5DD, UK

    Toby Walsh

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Bistarelli, S., Codognet, P., Rossi, F. (2000). An Abstraction Framework for Soft Constraints and Its Relationship with Constraint Propagation. In: Choueiry, B.Y., Walsh, T. (eds) Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation. SARA 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1864. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44914-0_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44914-0_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67839-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44914-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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