Abstract. In constraint satisfaction, local search is an incomplete method for finding a solution to a problem. Solving a general constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is known to be NP-complete; so that heuristic techniques are usually used. The main contribution of this work is twofold: (i) a technique for de-composing a CSP into a DFS-tree CSP structure; (ii) an heuristic search technique for solving DFS-tree CSP structures. This heuristic search technique has been empirically evaluated with random CSPs. The evaluation results show that the behavior of our heuristic outperforms than the behavior of a centralized algorithm.
Montserrat Abril, Miguel A. Salido, Federico Barbe