Using Tabu search in CSPS

Abstract

A heuristic method TABU-CSP using Tabu Search (TS) is described for solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs). The method is started with a complete but inconsistent solution of a binary CSP and obtained in prespecified number of iterations either a consistent solution or a near optimal solution with an acceptable number of conflicts. The repair in the solution at each iterative step is done by using two heuristics alternatively. The first heuristic is a min-conflict heuristic that chooses a variable with the maximum number of conflicts and reassigns it the value which leads to the minimum number of conflicts. If the acceptable solution is not reached after the search continued for a certain number of iterations, the min-conflict heuristic is changed and the variable selected least number of times is chosen for repair. If an acceptable solution is not reached, the method switches back to the min-conflict heuristic and proceeds further. This allowed the method to explore a different region of search space for the solution as well as to prevent cycling.

The demonstration of the method is shown on a toy problem [9] which has no solution. The method is then tested on various randomly generated CSPs with different starting solutions. The performance of the proposed method in terms of the average number of consistency is checked and the average number of conflicts is compared with that of the Branch and Bound (BB) method used to obtain the same solution. In almost all cases, the proposed method moves faster to the acceptable solution than BB.