Improving GAC-4 for Table and MDD Constraints

We introduce GAC-4R, MDD-4, and MDD-4R three new algorithms for maintaining arc consistency for table and MDD constraints. GAC-4R improves the well-known GAC-4 algorithm by managing the internal data structures in a different way. Instead of maintaining the internal data structures only by studying the consequences of deletions, we propose to reset the data structures by recomputing them from scratch whenever it saves time. This idea avoids the major drawback of the GAC-4 algorithm, i.e., its cost at a shallow search-tree depth. We also show that this idea can be exploited in MDD constraints. Experiments show that GAC-4R is competitive with the best arc-consistency algorithms for table constraints, and that MDD-4R clearly outperforms all classical algorithms for table or MDD constraints.