Automatic Synthesis of Smart Table Constraints
by Abstraction of Table Constraints
Abstract
The smart table constraint represents a powerful
modeling tool that has been recently introduced.
This constraint allows the user to represent compactly a number of well-known (global) constraints
and more generally any arbitrarily structured constraints, especially when disjunction is at stake. In
many problems, some constraints are given under
the basic and simple form of tables explicitly listing the allowed combinations of values. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to convert automatically any (ordinary) table into a compact smart table. Its theoretical time complexity is shown to be
quadratic in the size of the input table. Experimental results demonstrate its compression efficiency
on many constraint cases while showing its reasonable execution time. It is then shown that using filtering algorithms on the resulting smart table
is more efficient than using state-of-the-art filtering
algorithms on the initial table