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Opportunistic Specialization in Russian Doll Search

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Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming - CP 2002 (CP 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2470))

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Abstract

Russian Doll Search (RDS) is a clever procedure to solve overconstrained problems. RDS solves a sequence of nested subproblems, each including one more variable than the previous, until the whole problem is solved. Specialized RDS (SRDS) solves each subproblem for every value of the new variable. SRDS lower bound is better than RDS lower bound, causing a higher efficiency. A natural extension is Full Specialized RDS (FSRDS), which solves each subproblem for every value of every variable. Although FSRDS lower bound is better than the SRDS one, the extra work performed by FSRDS renders it inefficient. However, much of the useless work can be avoided. With this aim, we present Opportunistic Specialization in RDS (OSRDS), an algorithm that lies between SRDS and FSRDS. In addition to specialize the values of one variable, OSRDS specializes some values of other variables that look promising to increase the lower bound in the current distribution of inconsistency counts. Experimental results on random and real problems show the benefits of this approach.

The first two authors were supported by the IST Programme of the Commission of the European Union through the ECSPLAIN project (IST-1999-11969), and by the Spanish CICYT project TAP99-1086-C03-02.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IIIA-CSIC, Campus UAB, 08193, Bellaterra, Spain

    Pedro Mesegue & Martí Sánchez

  2. ONERA, 2 av. Edouard Belin, BP 4025, 31055, Toulouse Cedex, France

    Gérard Verfaillie

Authors
  1. Pedro Mesegue
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  2. Martí Sánchez
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  3. Gérard Verfaillie
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Brown University, Box 1910, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Pascal Van Hentenryck

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Mesegue, P., Sánchez, M., Verfaillie, G. (2002). Opportunistic Specialization in Russian Doll Search. In: Van Hentenryck, P. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming - CP 2002. CP 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2470. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46135-3_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46135-3_18

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-44120-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46135-7

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