A Quadratic Propagator for the Inter-Distance Constraint


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Abstract

We present a new propagator achieving bound consistency for the interdistance constraint. This constraint ensures that, among a set of variables X1, …, Xn, the difference between two variables is at least p. This restriction models, in particular, scheduling problems in which tasks require p contiguous units of a resource to be completed. Until now, the best known propagator for bound consistency had time complexity O(n3). In this work we propose a quadratic propagator for the same level of consistency. We then show that this theoretical gain gives savings of an order of magnitude in our benchmark of scheduling problems.


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