Maintaining Virtual Arc Consistency Dynamically during Search

Abstract : Virtual Arc Consistency (VAC) is a recent local consistency for processing cost function networks (aka weighted constraint networks) that exploits a simple but powerful connection with standard constraint networks. It has allowed to close hard frequency assignment benchmarks and is capable of directly solving networks of submodular functions. The algorithm enforcing VAC is an iterative algorithm that solves a sequence of standard constraint networks. This algorithm has been improved by exploiting the idea of dynamic arc consistency between each iteration, leading to the dynamic VAC algorithm. When VAC is maintained during search, the difference between two adjacent nodes in the search tree is also limited. In this paper, we show that the incrementality of Dynamic VAC can also be useful when maintaining VAC during search and we present results showing that maintaining dynamic VAC during search can effectively accelerate search.