An Empirical Comparison of CSP Decomposition Methods

We present an empirical comparison of decomposition techniques for CSPs. We compare three popular heuristics for tree decomposition and an exact method for optimal tree decomposition, along with two methods for hypertree decomposition. We use a small sample of instances in the experiments. We find that the connected hypertree decomposition method finds more optimal width decompositions than the other methods. In the case, the width of the tree decomposition obtained is the criteria for comparison, then the heuristics are still the better option than the optimal decomposition methods. Especially, the min-fill heuristic quickly finds relatively very good decompositions.