Compact-MDD: Efficiently Filtering (s)MDD Constraints with Reversible Sparse Bit-sets
Abstract
Multi-Valued Decision Diagrams (MDDs) are instrumental in modeling combinatorial problems with Constraint Programming. In this paper, we propose a related data structure called sMDD (semi-MDD) where the central layer of the diagrams is non-deterministic. We show that it is easy and efficient to transform any table (set of tuples) into an sMDD. We also introduce a new filtering algorithm, called Compact-MDD, which is based on bitwise operations, and can be applied to both MDDs and sMDDs. Our experimental results show the practical interest of our approach.