Efficient representation of discrete sets for constraint programming

Abstract

In constraint solving for finite domains, efficient set represen tation is an important issue. In this paper we propose an enhancement of Erwig's diet representation called the enhanced diet, which represents a finite domain as an AVL tree of intervals. In addition to element insertion and deletion, we show that the domain splitting used for constraints such as X ≤ Y can be done in O(log m) steps by adopting Crane's Algorithm, where m is the number of intervals, not the number of elements. © Springer-Verlag 2003.