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Tractable disjunctive constraints

  • Session 7a
  • Conference paper
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Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming-CP97 (CP 1997)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1330))

Abstract

Many combinatorial search problems can be expressed as ‘constraint satisfaction problems’, and this class of problems is known to be NP-complete in general. In this paper we investigate ‘disjunctive constraints’, that is, constraints which have the form of the disjunction of two constraints of specified types. We show that when the constraint types involved in the disjunction have a certain property, which we call ‘independence’, and when a certain restricted class of problems is tractable, then the class of all problems involving these disjunctive constraints is tractable. We give examples to show that many known examples of tractable constraint classes arise in this way, and derive new tractable classes which have not previously been identified.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

    David Cohen & Peter Jeavons

  2. Department of Computation, UMIST, Manchester, UK

    Manolis Koubarakis

Authors
  1. David Cohen
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  2. Peter Jeavons
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  3. Manolis Koubarakis
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Editor information

Gert Smolka

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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Cohen, D., Jeavons, P., Koubarakis, M. (1997). Tractable disjunctive constraints. In: Smolka, G. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming-CP97. CP 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1330. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017461

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017461

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-63753-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69642-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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