Advances in polytime isomorph elimination for configuration

Abstract

An inherent and often very underestimated difficulty in solving configuration problems is the existence of many structural isomorphisms. This issue of considerable importance attracted little research interest despite its applicability to almost all configuration problems. We define two search procedures allowing the removal of large portions of the search space thai provably solely contain non canonical solutions. The tests performed on each node are time polynomial. Experimental results are reported on a simple generic configuration example. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.