Synthesizing Constraint Expressions

An algorithm is presented for determining the values which simultaneously satisfy a set of relations, or constraints, involving different subsets of n variables. The relations are represented in a series of constraint networks, which ultimately contain a node for every subset of the n variable...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Freuder, Eugene C.
Language:en_US
Published: 2004
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/6247
Description
Summary:An algorithm is presented for determining the values which simultaneously satisfy a set of relations, or constraints, involving different subsets of n variables. The relations are represented in a series of constraint networks, which ultimately contain a node for every subset of the n variables. Constraints may be propagated through such networks in (potentially) parallel fashion to determine the values which simultaneously satisfy all the constraints. The iterated constraint propagation serves to mitigate combinatorial explosion. Applications in scene analysis, graph theory, and backtrack search are provided.