Abstract
This paper introduces the Increasing_Nvalue constraint, which restricts the number of distinct values assigned to a sequence of variables so that each variable in the sequence is less than or equal to its successor. This constraint is a specialization of the Nvalue constraint, motivated by symmetry breaking. Propagating the Nvalue constraint is known as an NP-hard problem. However, we show that the chain of non strict inequalities on the variables makes the problem polynomial. We propose an algorithm achieving generalized arc-consistency in O(ΣDi) time, where ΣDi is the sum of domain sizes. This algorithm is an improvement of filtering algorithms obtained by the automaton-based or the Slide-based reformulations. We evaluate our constraint on a resource allocation problem.
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Beldiceanu, N., Hermenier, F., Lorca, X., Petit, T. (2010). The Increasing Nvalue Constraint. In: Lodi, A., Milano, M., Toth, P. (eds) Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems. CPAIOR 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6140. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13520-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13520-0_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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