Implementing Propagators for Tabular Constraints

Many real-life constraints describing relations between the problem variables have complex semantics. It means that the constraint domain is defined using a table of compatible tuples rather than using a formula. In the paper we study the implementation of filtering algorithms (propagators) for such constraints that we call tabular constraints. In particular, we propose compact representations of extensionally defined binary constraints and we describe filtering algorithms for them. We concentrate on the implementation aspects of these algorithms so the proposed propagators can be naturally integrated into existing constraint satisfaction packages like SICStus Prolog.

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