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Efficient Reasoning for Nogoods in Constraint Solvers with BDDs

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Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 4902))

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Abstract

When BDDs are used for propagation in a constraint solver with nogood recording, it is necessary to find a small subset of a given set of variable assignments that is enough for a BDD to imply a new variable assignment. We show that the task of finding such a minimum subset is NP-complete by reduction from the hitting set problem. We present a new algorithm for finding such a minimal subset, which runs in time linear in the size of the BDD representation. In our experiments, the new method is up to ten times faster than the previous method, thereby reducing the solution time by even more than 80%. Due to linear time complexity the new method is able to scale well.

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Paul Hudak David S. Warren

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Subbarayan, S. (2007). Efficient Reasoning for Nogoods in Constraint Solvers with BDDs. In: Hudak, P., Warren, D.S. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4902. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77442-6_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77442-6_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-77441-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-77442-6

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