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  Making AC-3 an optimal algorithm (2001) [27 citations — 4 self]

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by Yuanlin Zhang, H. C. Yap
In Proceedings of IJCAI-01
http://www.cs.ttu.edu/~yzhang/publications/ac3-1-ijcai01.pdf
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Abstract:

The AC-3 algorithm is a basic and widely used arc consistency enforcing algorithm in Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP). Its strength lies in that it is simple, empirically efficient and extensible. However its worst case time complexity was not considered optimal since the first complexity result for AC-3 [Mackworth and Freuder, 1985] with the bound O(ed 3), where e is the number of constraints and d the size of the largest domain. In this paper, we show suprisingly that AC-3 achieves the optimal worst case time complexity with O(ed 2). The result is applied to obtain a path consistency algorithm which has the same time and space complexity as the best known theoretical results. Our experimental results show that the new approach to AC-3 is comparable to the traditional AC-3 implementation for simpler problems where AC-3 is more efficient than other algorithms and significantly faster on hard instances. 1

Citations

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44 Ordering heuristics for arc consistency algorithms – Wallace, Freuder - 1992
42 Using constraint metaknowledge to reduce arc consistency computation – Bessière, Freuder, et al. - 1999
39 A distributed arc-consistency algorithm – Nguyen, Deville - 1998
37 Why AC-3 is almost always better than AC-4 for establishing arc consistency in CSPs – Wallace - 1993
28 MAC and combined heuristics: Two reasons to forsake FC (and CBJ?) on hard problems – Bessière, Régin - 1996
6 Radio link frequency assignment, Constraints 4(1 – Cabon, Givry, et al. - 1999
6 Arc consistency on n-ary monotonic and linear constraints – Zhang, Yap - 2000
3 Random uniform CSP generators, http://www.lirmm.fr/∼bessiere/generator.html – Frost, Bessiere, et al. - 1996
3 Freuder 1985. The complexity of some polynomial network consistency algorithms for constraint satisfaction problems,, Art. Int.25 – Mackworth, C - 1985
1 Arc-consistency and arcconsistency again, Art – Bessiere - 1994
1 Path consistency revisited, Int – Singh - 1996