Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming – CP’99

We provide here a simple, yet very general framework that allows us to explain several constraint propagation algorithms in a systematic way. In particular, using the notions commutativity and semi-commutativity, we show how the well-known AC-3, PC-2, DAC and DPC algorithms are instances of a single generic algorithm. The work reported here extends and simplifies that of Apt [1].