Schedulers and Redundancy for a Class of Constraint Propagation Rules

TL;DR

This paper develops efficient schedulers for a class of constraint propagation rules, improving performance and reducing redundancy in rule-based constraint programming systems.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic scheduler derived from a generic iteration algorithm, enhancing execution efficiency and redundancy elimination for membership rules.

Findings

Significantly improved performance over standard CHR rules

Effective identification and reduction of redundant rules

Demonstrated applicability to rule-based constraint programming

Abstract

We study here schedulers for a class of rules that naturally arise in the context of rule-based constraint programming. We systematically derive a scheduler for them from a generic iteration algorithm of [Apt 2000]. We apply this study to so-called membership rules of [Apt and Monfroy 2001]. This leads to an implementation that yields a considerably better performance for these rules than their execution as standard CHR rules. Finally, we show how redundant rules can be identified and how appropriately reduced sets of rules can be computed.