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Towards Solver-Independent Propagators

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Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7514))

Abstract

We present an extension to indexicals to describe propagators for global constraints. The resulting language is compiled into actual propagators for different solvers, and is solver-independent. In addition, we show how this high-level description eases the proof of propagator properties, such as correctness and monotonicity. Experimental results show that propagators compiled from their indexical descriptions are sometimes not significantly slower than built-in propagators of Gecode. Therefore, our language can be used for the rapid prototyping of new global constraints.

This work is supported by grant 2011-6133 of the Swedish Research Council (VR). We thank the anonymous reviewers and Christian Schulte for their useful comments.

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Monette, JN., Flener, P., Pearson, J. (2012). Towards Solver-Independent Propagators. In: Milano, M. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7514. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33558-7_40

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33558-7_40

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33557-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33558-7

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