The Power of Regular Constraints in CSPs

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of the regular membership constraint as a replacement for other (global) constraints. The goal is to replace some or all constraints of a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) with regular constraints and to combine them into a new regular constraint to remove redundancy and to improve the solution speed of CSPs. By means of a rostering problem as an example it is shown that our approach allows a significant improvement of the solution performance due to a reduction of the size of the search tree.