A Maximal Tractable Class of Soft Constraints

Many optimization problems can be expressed us­ ing some form of soft constraints, where different measures of desirability arc associated with differ­ ent combinations of domain values for specified subsets of variables. In this paper we identify a class of soft binary constraints for which the prob­ lem of finding the optimal solution is tractable. In other words, we show that for any given set of such constraints, there exists a polynomial time al­ gorithm to determine the assignment having the best overall combined measure of desirability. This tractable class includes many commonly-occurring soft constraints, such as "as near as possible" or "as soon as possible after", as well as crisp constraints such as "greater than'1 .

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: IJCAI
• Authors: David A. Cohen, Martin C. Cooper, Peter Jeavons, Andrei A. Krokhin
• Keywords: Commonly-occurring Soft Constraints, IJCAI 2003, IJCAI 2007, Soft Binary Constraints, Soft Constraints