Abstract
The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a popular used paradigm to model a wide spectrum of optimization problems in artificial intelligence. This paper presents a fast metaheuristic for solving binary constraint satisfaction problems. The method can be classified as a variable depth search metaheuristic combining a greedy local search using a self-adaptive weighting strategy on the constraint weights. Several metaheuristics have been developed in the past using various penalty weight mechanisms on the constraints. What distinguishes the proposed metaheuristic from those developed in the past is the update ofkvariables during each iteration when moving from one assignment of values to another. The benchmark is based on hard random constraint satisfaction problems enjoying several features that make them of a great theoretical and practical interest. The results show that the proposed metaheuristic is capable of solving hard unsolved problems that still remain a challenge for both complete and incomplete methods. In addition, the proposed metaheuristic is remarkably faster than all existing solvers when tested on previously solved instances. Finally, its distinctive feature contrary to other metaheuristics is the absence of parameter tuning making it highly suitable in practical scenarios.
Highlights
Organizations like companies or public institutions are confronted in their daily life with a large number of combinatorial optimization problems which occur in many different application domains such as Operations Research, hardware design, financial decision making, or even biology (DNA sequencing)
This has led to the development of several algorithms for solving constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) which usually fall into two main categories: systematic algorithms and local search algorithms
Traditional local search algorithms for solving CSP problems start from an initial solution s and repeat replacing s with a better solution in its neighborhood N(s) until no better solution is found in N(s), where N(s) is a set of solutions obtained from s by updating the value of one selected variable
Summary
This paper presents a fast metaheuristic for solving binary constraint satisfaction problems. The method can be classified as a variable depth search metaheuristic combining a greedy local search using a self-adaptive weighting strategy on the constraint weights. Several metaheuristics have been developed in the past using various penalty weight mechanisms on the constraints. What distinguishes the proposed metaheuristic from those developed in the past is the update of k variables during each iteration when moving from one assignment of values to another. The benchmark is based on hard random constraint satisfaction problems enjoying several features that make them of a great theoretical and practical interest. The results show that the proposed metaheuristic is capable of solving hard unsolved problems that still remain a challenge for both complete and incomplete methods.
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