Watched Literals for Constraint Propagation in Minion

Efficient constraint propagation is crucial to any constraint solver. We show that watched literals, already a great success in the satisfiability community, can be used to provide highly efficient implementations of constraint propagators. We describe three important aspects of watched literals as we apply them to constraints, and how they are implemented in the Minion constraint solver. We show three successful applications of to constraint propagators: the sum of Boolean variables; GAC for the ‘element' constraint; and GAC for the ‘table' constraint.

[1]  Niklas Sörensson,et al.  An Extensible SAT-solver , 2003, SAT.

[2]  Jean-Charles Régin,et al.  Maintaining Arc Consistency Algorithms During the Search Without Additional Space Cost , 2005, CP.

[3]  Christian Bessiere,et al.  Using Inference to Reduce Arc Consistency Computation , 1995, IJCAI.

[4]  Pascal Van Hentenryck,et al.  Generality versus Specificity: An Experience with AI and OR Techniques , 1988, AAAI.

[5]  Pascal Van Hentenryck,et al.  Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of the Constraint Language cc(FD) , 1994, Constraint Programming.

[6]  François Laburhe CHOCO: implementing a CP kernel , 2007 .

[7]  Ian P. Gent,et al.  Minion: A Fast Scalable Constraint Solver , 2006, ECAI.

[8]  A. Kuehlmann,et al.  A fast pseudo-Boolean constraint solver , 2005, Proceedings 2003. Design Automation Conference (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37451).

[9]  Roland H. C. Yap,et al.  An optimal coarse-grained arc consistency algorithm , 2005, Artif. Intell..

[10]  Christian Bessiere,et al.  Arc Consistency for General Constraint Networks: Preliminary Results , 1997, IJCAI.

[11]  Sharad Malik,et al.  Chaff: engineering an efficient SAT solver , 2001, Proceedings of the 38th Design Automation Conference (IEEE Cat. No.01CH37232).

[12]  Peter J. Stuckey,et al.  Speeding Up Constraint Propagation , 2004, CP.

[13]  Thomas Stützle,et al.  SATLIB: An Online Resource for Research on SAT , 2000 .

[14]  Christian Bessiere,et al.  Arc-Consistency and Arc-Consistency Again , 1993, Artif. Intell..