Towards Cooperative Interval Narrowing

P. Van Hentenryck et al. have designed an efficient interval constraint solver combining box consistency and Gauss-Seidel iterations, that is the core of Numerica. F. Benhamou et al. have shown that hull consistency may be faster and more accurate than box consistency. Their algorithm merges both consistency techniques taking care of the constraints’ expressions. This paper presents a new algorithm BC5 enforcing hull consistency, box consistency and the interval Gauss-Seidel method. The main idea is to weaken the local contractions and to let the propagation operate between all elementary solvers in order to accelerate the computation while preserving the same precision. Algorithm BC5 is finally compared with the constraint solving algorithm of Numerica.

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