Streamlined constraint reasoning

Abstract

We introduce a new approach for focusing constraint reasoning using so-called streamlining constraints. Such constraints partition the solution space to drive the search first towards a small and structured combinatorial subspace. The streamlining constraints capture regularities observed in a subset of the solutions to smaller problem instances. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by solving a number of hard combinatorial design problems. Our experiments show that streamlining scales significantly beyond previous approaches. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.