Saving constraint checks in maintaining coarse-grained generalized arc consistency

Constraint check plays a central role in establishing generalized arc consistency which is widely used to solve constraint satisfaction problems. In this paper, we propose a new generalized arc consistency algorithm, called GTR, which ensures that the tuples that have been checked to be allowed by a constraint will never be checked again. For each constraint, GTR maintains a dynamic list of the tuples that were checked to be allowed by this constraint and check their validities to identify some values with supports. It is equipped with a mechanism avoiding redundant validity checks. The basic GAC3 algorithm is employed to find a support for the rest values and to add new tuples to the dynamic list. The experiments show that maintaining GTR during search saves a number of constraint checks. It also brings some improvements over cpu time while solving some CSPs with tight constraints.

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