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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© 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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