Abstract

Enumeration strategies (that is, selection of a variable and a value of its domain) are crucial components of Constraint Programming: they significantly influence the performances of the solving process, sometimes of several orders of magnitude. In this paper, we propose to use Local Search in order to help and guide enumeration: we extend the usual variable selection strategies of constraint programming and we perform the value selection with respect to the results of some local search. The experimental results obtained are rather promising.

Key words: Constraint programming, local search, hybridization methods, heuristic search.

Abbreviation

CSP, Constraint satisfaction problem; LS, local search; TSP,travelling salesman problem