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On the arc consistency problem

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new arc consistency algorithm, AC-8, which requires less computation time and space than AC-6 and AC-7. The main idea of the optimization is the divide-and-conquer strategy, thereby decomposing an arc consistency problem into a series of smaller ones and trying to solve them in sequence. In this way, not only the space complexity but also the time complexity can be reduced. The reason for this is that due to the ahead of time performed inconsistency propagation (in the sense that some of them are executed before the entire inconsistency checking has been finished), each constraint subnetwork will be searched with a gradually shrunk domain. In addition, the technique of AC-6 can be integrated into our algorithm, leading to a further decrease in computational complexity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Chemnitz-Zwickau, 09107, Chemnitz, Germany

    Chen Yangjun

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  1. Chen Yangjun
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CHEN Yangjun received his BS degree in information system engineering from the Technical Institute of Changsha, China, in 1982, and his Diploma and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, in 1990 and 1995, respectively. From 1995 to 1997, he worked as an assistant professor at the Technical University of Chemnitz-Zwickau, Germany. Dr. Chen is currently a senior engineer at German National Research Center of Information Technology. His research interests include deductive databases, federative databases, multimedia databases, constraint satisfaction problem, graph theory and combinatorics. He has more than 50 publications in these areas.

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Chen, Y. On the arc consistency problem. J. Comput. Sci. & Technol. 14, 298–308 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02948731

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02948731

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