Octagonal domains for continuous constraints

Abstract

Domains in Continuous Constraint Programming (CP) are generally represented with intervals whose n-ary Cartesian product (box) approximates the solution space. This paper proposes a new representation for continuous variable domains based on octagons. We generalize local consistency and split to this octagon representation, and we propose an octagonal-based branch and prune algorithm. Preliminary experimental results show promising performance improvements on several classical benchmarks. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.