Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons^™

Practical Tractability Of Csps By Higher Level Consistency And Tree Decomposition, Shant Karakashian

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Constraint Satisfaction is a flexible paradigm for modeling many decision problems in Engineering, Computer Science, and Management. Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) are in general NP-complete and are usually solved with search. Research has identified various islands of tractability, which enable solving certain CSPs with backtrack-free search. For example, one sufficient condition for tractability relates the consistency level of a CSP to treewidth of the CSP's constraint network. However, enforcing higher levels of consistency on a CSP may require the addition of constraints, thus altering the topology of the constraint network and increasing its treewidth. This thesis addresses the following question: …