Tractable Cases of the Extended Global Cardinality Constraint

We study the consistency problem for extended global cardinality (EGC) constraints. An EGC constraint consists of a set X of variables, a set D of values, a domain D(x) D for each variable x, and a "cardinality set" K(d) of non-negative integers for each value d. The problem is to instantiate each variable x with a value in D(x) such that for each value d, the number of variables instantiated with d belongs to the cardinality set K(d). It is known that this problem is NP-complete in general, but solvable in polynomial time if all cardinality sets are intervals. First we pinpoint connections between EGC constraints and general factors in graphs. This allows us to extend the known polynomial-time case to certain non-interval cardinality sets. Second we consider EGC constraints under restrictions in terms of the treewidth of the value graph (the bipartite graph representing variablevalue pairs) and the cardinality-width (the largest integer occurring in the cardinality sets). ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CATS
• Authors: Marko Samer, Stefan Szeider
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Cardinality Sets, CATS 2008, Egc Constraints, Value D