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Structural Consistency: A New Filtering Approach for Constraint Networks

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Graph Structures for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8323))

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Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new partial consistency for constraint networks which is called Structural Consistency of level w and is denoted w-SC consistency. This consistency is based on a new approach. While conventional consistencies generally rely on local properties extended to the entire network, this new partial consistency considers global consistency on subproblems. These subproblems are defined by partial constraint graphs whose tree-width is bounded by a constant w. We introduce a filtering algorithm which achieves w-SC consistency. We also analyze w-SC filtering w.r.t. other classical local consistencies to prove that this consistency is generally incomparable although this consistency can be regarded as a special case of inverse consistency. Finally, we present experimental results to assess the usefulness of this approach. We show that w-SC is a significantly more powerful level of filtering and more effective w.r.t. the runtime than SAC and that w-SC is a complementary approach to AC or SAC. So we can offer a combination of filterings, whose power is greater than w-SC or SAC.

This work was supported by the French National Research Agency under grant TUPLES (ANR-2010-BLAN-0210).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. LSIS - UMR CNRS 7296, Aix-Marseille Université, Avenue Escadrille Normandie-Niemen, 13397, Marseille Cedex 20, France

    Philippe Jégou & Cyril Terrioux

Authors
  1. Philippe Jégou
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  2. Cyril Terrioux
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. LIRMM, 161, rue ADA, 34392, Montpellier Cedex 5, France

    Madalina Croitoru

  2. Fakultät Informatik, Technische Universität Dresden, Nöthnitzer Str. 46, 01187, Dresden, Germany

    Sebastian Rudolph

  3. Institute of Information Systems, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

    Stefan Woltran

  4. Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris 6 (LIP6/UPMC), Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 4, place Jussieu, 75005, Paris, France

    Christophe Gonzales

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Jégou, P., Terrioux, C. (2014). Structural Consistency: A New Filtering Approach for Constraint Networks. In: Croitoru, M., Rudolph, S., Woltran, S., Gonzales, C. (eds) Graph Structures for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8323. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04534-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04534-4_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-04533-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-04534-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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