A binary CSP instance satisfying the broken-triangle property (BTP) can be solved in polynomial time. Unfortunately, in practice, few instances satisfy the BTP. We show that a local version of the BTP allows the merging of domain values in arbitrary instances of binary CSP, thus providing a novel polynomial-time reduction operation. Extensive experimental trials on benchmark instances demonstrate a significant decrease in instance size for certain classes of problems. We show that BTP-merging can be generalised to instances with constraints of arbitrary arity and we investigate the theoretical relationship with resolution in SAT. A directional version of the general-arity BTP then allows us to extend the BTP tractable class previously defined only for binary CSP. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.
CITATION STYLE
Cooper, M. C., El Mouelhi, A., Terrioux, C., & Zanuttini, B. (2014). On broken triangles. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 8656 LNCS, pp. 9–24). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10428-7_5
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