The Energetic Reasoning Checker Revisited

TL;DR

This paper improves the efficiency of the Energetic Reasoning checker for the Cumulative constraint by reducing irrelevant interval considerations, enabling more practical use and better integration with filtering algorithms.

Contribution

It provides a sharp characterization that reduces the number of considered intervals by a factor of seven, enhancing the checker’s practicality.

Findings

Interval reduction by a factor of seven

Improved integration with Time-Table filtering

Promising experimental results

Abstract

Energetic Reasoning (ER) is a powerful filtering algorithm for the Cumulative constraint. Unfortunately, ER is generally too costly to be used in practice. One reason of its bad behavior is that many intervals are considered as relevant by the checker of ER, although most of them should be ignored. In this paper, we provide a sharp characterization that allows to reduce the number of intervals by a factor seven. Our experiments show that associating this checker with a Time-Table filtering algorithm leads to promising results.