1996
Jörg Würtz and Tobias Müller
Finite Domain Programming is a technique for solving combinatorial
problems like planning, scheduling, configuration or timetabling.
Inevitably, these problems employ disjunctive constraints. A rather new
approach to model those constraints is constructive
disjunction, whereby common information is lifted from the alternatives,
aiming for stronger pruning of the search space.
We show
where constructive disjunction provides for stronger pruning and where
it fails to do so.
For several problems, including a real-world college
timetabling application, benefits and limitations of constructive
disjunction are exemplified.
As an experimental
platform we use the concurrent constraint language Oz.
20th German Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1996, Springer-Verlag