Tractable Symmetry Breaking for CSPs with Interchangeable Values

Symmetry breaking in CSPs has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Various general schemes have been proposed to eliminate symmetries during search. In general, these schemes may take exponential space or time to eliminate all symmetries. This paper studies classes of CSPs for which symmetry breaking is tractable. It identifies several CSP classes which feature various forms of value interchangeability and shows that symmetry breaking can be performed in constant time and space during search using dedicated search procedures. Experimental results also show the benefits of symmetry breaking on these CSPs, which encompass many practical applications.

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