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Exploring Declarative Local-Search Neighbourhoods with Constraint Programming

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Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11802))

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Abstract

Using constraint programming (CP) to explore a local-search neighbourhood was first tried in the mid 1990s. The advantage is that constraint propagation can quickly rule out uninteresting neighbours, sometimes greatly reducing the number actually probed. However, a CP model of the neighbourhood has to be handcrafted from the model of the problem: this can be difficult and tedious. That research direction appears abandoned since large-neighbourhood search (LNS) and constraint-based local search (CBLS) arose as alternatives that seem easier to use. Recently, the notion of declarative neighbourhood was added to the technology-independent modelling language MiniZinc, for use by any backend to MiniZinc, but currently only used by a CBLS backend. We demonstrate that declarative neighbourhoods are indeed technology-independent by using the old idea of CP-based neighbourhood exploration: we explain how to encode automatically a declarative neighbourhood into a CP model of the neighbourhood. This enables us to lift any CP solver into a local-search backend to MiniZinc. Our prototype is competitive with CP, CBLS, and LNS backends to MiniZinc.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/informarte/yuck.

  2. 2.

    http://lopez-ibanez.eu/tsptw-instances.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback that helped improve this paper. This work is supported by the Swedish Research Council (VR) through Project Grant 2015-04910.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Gustav Björdal, Pierre Flener & Justin Pearson

  2. Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Peter J. Stuckey

Authors
  1. Gustav Björdal
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  2. Pierre Flener
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  3. Justin Pearson
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  4. Peter J. Stuckey
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gustav Björdal .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. INRA, Castanet Tolosan, France

    Thomas Schiex

  2. INRA, Castanet Tolosan, France

    Simon de Givry

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Björdal, G., Flener, P., Pearson, J., Stuckey, P.J. (2019). Exploring Declarative Local-Search Neighbourhoods with Constraint Programming. In: Schiex, T., de Givry, S. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11802. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30048-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30048-7_3

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