A new tractable class of constraint satisfaction problems

Abstract

In this paper we consider constraint satisfaction problems where the set of constraint relations is fixed. Feder and Vardi (1998) identified three families of constraint satisfaction problems containing all known polynomially solvable problems. We introduce a new class of problems called para-primal problems, incomparable with the families identified by Feder and Vardi (1998) and we prove that any constraint problem in this class is decidable in polynomial time. As an application of this result we prove a complete classification for the complexity of constraint satisfaction problems under the assumption that the basis contains all the permutation relations. In the proofs, we make an intensive use of algebraic results from clone theory about the structure of para-primal and homogeneous algebras.