Propagating Logical Combinations of Constraints

摘要

Many constraint toolkits provide logical connectives like disjunction, negation and implication. These permit complex constraint expressions to be built from primitive constraints. However, the propagation of such complex constraint expressions is typically limited. We therefore present a simple and light weight method for propagating complex constraint expressions. We provide a precise characterization of when this method enforces generalized arc-consistency. In addition, we demonstrate that with our method many different global constraints can be easily implemented.