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A Specialised Binary Constraint for the Stable Marriage Problem

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Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation (SARA 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 3607))

Abstract

We present a specialised binary constraint for the stable marriage problem. This constraint acts between a pair of integer variables where the domains of those variables represent preferences. Our constraint enforces stability and disallows bigamy. For a stable marriage instance with n men and women we require n 2 of these constraints, and the complexity of enforcing arc-consistency is O(n 3). Although this is non-optimal, empirical evidence suggests that in practical terms our encoding significantly outperforms the optimal encoding given in [7] in both space and time.

The first author is supported by EPSRC. Software support was given by an ILOG SA’s academic grant.

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Unsworth, C., Prosser, P. (2005). A Specialised Binary Constraint for the Stable Marriage Problem. In: Zucker, JD., Saitta, L. (eds) Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation. SARA 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3607. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11527862_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11527862_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-27872-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31882-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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