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Compiling Conditional Constraints

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Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11802))

Abstract

Conditionals are a core concept in all programming languages. They are also a natural and powerful mechanism for expressing complex constraints in constraint modelling languages. The behaviour of conditionals is complicated by undefinedness. In this paper we show how to most effectively translate conditional constraints for underlying solvers. We show that the simple translation into implications can be improved, at least in terms of reasoning strength, for both constraint programming and mixed integer programming solvers. Unit testing shows that the new translations are more efficient, but the benefits are not so clear on full models where the interaction with other features such as learning is more complicated.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that we use a simplified FlatZinc syntax, including support for reified element constraints, to improve readability.

  2. 2.

    We use array slicing notation equivalent to .

  3. 3.

    Proofs of theorems not included in this paper can be found in the extended version at https://www.minizinc.org/pub/mzn_conditionals.pdf.

  4. 4.

    See https://github.com/minizinc/minizinc-benchmarks.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments that helped improve this paper. This work was partly sponsored by the Australian Research Council grant DP180100151.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Peter J. Stuckey & Guido Tack

  2. Data61, CSIRO, Melbourne, Australia

    Peter J. Stuckey & Guido Tack

Authors
  1. Peter J. Stuckey
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  2. Guido Tack
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Guido Tack .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. INRA, Castanet Tolosan, France

    Thomas Schiex

  2. INRA, Castanet Tolosan, France

    Simon de Givry

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Stuckey, P.J., Tack, G. (2019). Compiling Conditional Constraints. In: Schiex, T., de Givry, S. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11802. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30048-7_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30048-7_23

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-30047-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-30048-7

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