SLIDE: A Useful Special Case of the CARDPATH Constraint
Abstract
We study the CARDPATH constraint. This ensures a given constraint holds a number of times down a sequence of variables. We show that SLIDE, a special case of CARDPATH where the slid constraint must hold always, can be used to encode a wide range of sliding sequence constraints including CARDPATH itself. We con- sider how to propagate SLIDE and provide a complete propagator for CARDPATH. Since propagation is NP-hard in general, we identify special cases where propagation takes polynomial time. Our experi- ments demonstrate that using SLIDE to encode global constraints can be as efficient and effective as specialised propagators.
Domains
Artificial Intelligence [cs.AI]
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