A symbiotic approach to arc and path consistency checking

Abstract

The resolution of constraint satisfaction problems heavily relies on the use of local consistency enforcement procedures which are used to filter the problems before or during their resolution. While procedures based on arc-consistency are almost a standard, path-consistency checking is often neglected because it is costly and it filters out pairs of assignments instead of single assignments. This paper presents a domain filtering procedure that tightly combines the use of arc and path-consistency, each one helping the other to achieve further or faster work. We show, on an experimental evaluation, that the proposed procedure offers a considerable filtering power at relatively low cost.