Using CBR to select solution strategies in constraint programming

Abstract

Constraint programming is a powerful paradigm that offers many different strategies for solving problems. Choosing a good strategy is difficult; choosing a poor strategy wastes resources and may result in a problem going unsolved. We show how Case-Based Reasoning can be used to select good strategies. We design experiments which demonstrate that, on two problems with quite different characteristics, CBR can outperform four other strategy selection techniques. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.