Dynamic heuristics for branch and bound search on tree-decomposition of Weighted CSPs.pdfVIP

Dynamic heuristics for branch and bound search on tree-decomposition of Weighted CSPs Philippe Je?gou, Samba Ndojh Ndiaye, and Cyril Terrioux LSIS - UMR CNRS 6168 Universite? Paul Ce?zanne (Aix-Marseille 3) Avenue Escadrille Normandie-Niemen 13397 Marseille Cedex 20 (France) {philippe.jegou, samba-ndojh.ndiaye, cyril.terrioux}@univ-cezanne.fr Abstract. This paper deals with methods exploiting tree-decomposition approaches for solving weighted constraint networks. We consider here the practical efficiency of these approaches by defining five classes of vari- able orders more and more dynamic which preserve the time complexity bound. For that, we define extensions of this theoretical time complex- ity bound to increase the dynamic aspect of these orders. We define a constant k allowing us to extend the classical bound from O(exp(w+1)) firstly to O(exp(w + k)), and finally to O(exp(2(w + k))), where w de- notes the ”tree-width” of a Weighted CSP. Finally, we assess the defined theoretical extension of the time complexity bound from a practical view- point. 1 Introduction The CSP formalism (Constraint Satisfaction Problem) offers a powerful frame- work for representing and solving efficiently many problems. Modeling a problem as a CSP consists in defining a set X of variables x1, x2, . . . xn, which must be as- signed in their respective finite domain, by satisfying a set C of constraints which express restrictions between the different possible assignments. A solution is an assignment of every variable which satisfies all the constraints. Determining if a solution exists is a NP-complete problem. This framework has been extended in order to capture notions like preference or possibility or, when there is no solution, to produce an assignment minimizing a given criterion on constraint satisfaction. Hence, recently, many extensions of the CSP framework have been proposed (e.g. [1–3]). In this paper, we focus our study on Weighted CSPs (WCSPs) which is a well known framew