Abstract
In this paper, we describe Compact-Table (CT), a bitwise algorithm to enforce Generalized Arc Consistency (GAC) on table constraints. Although this algorithm is the default propagator for table constraints in or-tools and OscaR, two publicly available CP solvers, it has never been described so far. Importantly, CT has been recently improved further with the introduction of residues, resetting operations and a data-structure called reversible sparse bit-set, used to maintain tables of supports (following the idea of tabular reduction): tuples are invalidated incrementally on value removals by means of bit-set operations. The experimentation that we have conducted with OscaR shows that CT outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms STR2, STR3, GAC4R, MDD4R and AC5-TC on standard benchmarks.
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Notes
- 1.
We are aware of an independent work [34] on a similar topic, but hadn’t the opportunity of reading it at the time of writing our paper.
- 2.
Note that some parts of this paper were published in a Master Thesis report [7].
- 3.
One notable exception is Gecode, a copy-based solver.
- 4.
available at http://becool.info.ucl.ac.be.
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Demeulenaere, J. et al. (2016). Compact-Table: Efficiently Filtering Table Constraints with Reversible Sparse Bit-Sets. In: Rueher, M. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9892. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44953-1_14
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