Decomposing Constraint Satisfaction Problems by Means of Meta Constraint Satisfaction Optimization Problems

Abstract

This paper describes a new approach to decompose constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) using an auxiliary constraint satisfaction optimization problem (CSOP) that detects sub-CSPs which share only few common variables. The purpose of this approach is to find sub-CSPs which can be solved in parallel and combined to a complete solution of the original CSP. Therefore, our decomposition approach has two goals: 1. to evenly balance the workload distribution over all cores and solve the partial CSPs as fast as possible and 2. to minimize the number of shared variables to make the join process of the solutions as fast as possible.