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International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming

CP 1996: Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming — CP96 pp 267–281Cite as

A test for tractability

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1118))

Abstract

Many combinatorial search problems can be expressed as ‘constraint satisfaction problems’, and this class of problems is known to be NP-complete in general. In this paper we investigate restricted classes of constraints which give rise to tractable problems. We show that any set of constraints must satisfy a certain type of algebraic closure condition in order to avoid NP-completeness. We also describe a simple test which can be applied to establish whether a given set of constraints satisfies a condition of this kind. The test involves solving a particular constraint satisfaction problem, which we call an ‘indicator problem’.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

    Peter Jeavons & David Cohen

  2. Department WNI, University of Limburg, B-3590, Diepenbeek, Belgium

    Marc Gyssens

Authors
  1. Peter Jeavons
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  2. David Cohen
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  3. Marc Gyssens
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Editor information

Eugene C. Freuder

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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Jeavons, P., Cohen, D., Gyssens, M. (1996). A test for tractability. In: Freuder, E.C. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming — CP96. CP 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1118. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61551-2_80

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61551-2_80

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61551-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70620-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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