Abstract
The ability to specify CP programs in terms of a declarative model and a search procedure is instrumental to the industrial CP successes. Yet, writing search procedures is often difficult for novices or people accustomed to model & run approaches. The viewpoint adopted in this paper argues for the synthesis of a search from the declarative model to exploit the problem instance structures. The intent is not to eliminate the search. Instead, it is to have a default that performs adequately in the majority of cases while retaining the ability to write full-fledged procedures. Empirical results demonstrate that the approach is viable, yielding procedures approaching and sometimes rivaling hand-crafted searches.
This work is partially supported through NSF award IIS-0642906.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ahuja, R.K., Ergun, Ö., Orlin, J.B., Punnen, A.P.: A survey of very large-scale neighborhood search techniques. Discrete Appl. Math. 123(1-3), 75–102 (2002)
Beldiceanu, N., Contejean, E.: Introducing global constraints in CHIP. Mathematical and Computer Modelling 20(12), 97–123 (1994)
Boussemart, F., Hemery, F., Lecoutre, C., Sais, L.: Boosting Systematic Search by Weighting Constraints. In: Proceedings of the Sixteenth Eureopean Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ECAI 2004, pp. 146–150. IOS Press, Amsterdam (2004)
Elsayed, S.A.M., Michel, L.: Synthesis of search algorithms from high-level CP models. In: Cohen, D. (ed.) CP 2010. LNCS, vol. 6308, pp. 186–200. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Eriksson, M.: Detecting symmetries in relational models of CSPs. Master’s thesis, Department of Information Technology,Uppsala University, Sweden (2005)
Gent, I.P., Jefferson, C., Miguel, I.: Minion: A fast, scalable, constraint solver. In: ECAI 2006: 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, August 29-September 1, Riva del Garda, Italy, p. 98 (2006)
Gent, I.P., Walsh, T.: CSPLib: a benchmark library for constraints. In: Jaffar, J. (ed.) CP 1999. LNCS, vol. 1713, pp. 480–481. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Gibbs, J.P., Martin, W.T.: Urbanization, technology, and the division of labor: International patterns. American Sociological Review 27(5), 667–677 (1962)
Gomes, C.P., Selman, B., Crato, N., Kautz, H.: Heavy-tailed phenomena in satisfiability and constraint satisfaction problems. Journal of automated reasoning 24(1), 67–100 (2000)
Belgian Constraints Group. Data and results for the steel mill slab problem, http://becool.info.ucl.ac.be/steelmillslab , Technical report, UCLouvain
Haralick, R.M., Elliott, G.L.: Increasing tree search efficiency for constraint satisfaction problems. Artificial Intelligence 14(3), 263–313 (1980)
Harvey, W.D., Ginsberg, M.L.: Limited discrepancy search. In: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 14, pp. 607–615 (1995)
Van Hentenryck, P., Flener, P., Pearson, J., Ågren, M.: Tractable Symmetry Breaking for CSPs with Interchangeable Values. In: IJCAI, pp. 277–284 (2003)
SA ILOG. ILOG Concert 2.0
Michel, L., Van Hentenryck, P.: Impact-based versus Activity-based Search for Black-Box Contraint-Programming Solvers (2011), http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.6314
Monette, J.N., Deville, Y., Van Hentenryck, P.: Aeon: Synthesizing scheduling algorithms from high-level models. Operations Research and Cyber-Infrastructure, 43–59 (2009)
OMahony, E., Hebrard, E., Holland, A., Nugent, C., OSullivan, B.: Using case-based reasoning in an algorithm portfolio for constraint solving. In: 19th Irish Conference on AI (2008)
Refalo, P.: Impact-based search strategies for constraint programming. In: Wallace, M. (ed.) CP 2004. LNCS, vol. 3258, pp. 557–571. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Schaus, P., Hentenryck, P., Régin, J.-C.: Scalable load balancing in nurse to patient assignment problems. In: van Hoeve, W.-J., Hooker, J.N. (eds.) CPAIOR 2009. LNCS, vol. 5547, pp. 248–262. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Smith, B.M.: Succeed-first or fail-first: A case study in variable and value ordering. In: Malyshkin, V.E. (ed.) PaCT 1997. LNCS, vol. 1277, pp. 321–330. Springer, Heidelberg (1997)
Gecode Team. Gecode: Generic constraint development environment (2006), http://www.gecode.org
Van Hentenryck, P.: Constraint and integer programming in OPL. INFORMS Journal on Computing 14(4), 345–372 (2002)
Van Hentenryck, P., Flener, P., Pearson, J., Ågren, M.: Compositional derivation of symmetries for constraint satisfaction. Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation, 234–247 (2005)
Van Hentenryck, P., Michel, L.: Constraint-based local search. The MIT Press, Cambridge (2005)
Van Hentenryck, P., Michel, L.: The steel mill slab design problem revisited. In: Trick, M.A. (ed.) CPAIOR 2008. LNCS, vol. 5015, pp. 377–381. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Van Hentenryck, P., Michel, L.: Synthesis of constraint-based local search algorithms from high-level models. In: AAAI 2007, pp. 273–278. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Elsayed, S.A.M., Michel, L. (2011). Synthesis of Search Algorithms from High-Level CP Models. In: Lee, J. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming – CP 2011. CP 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6876. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23786-7_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23786-7_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23785-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23786-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)