A Symbiotic Approach to Arc and Path Consistency Checking

The resolution of constraint satisfaction problems heavily relies on the use of local consistency enforcement procedures which are used to lter the problems before or during their resolution. While procedures based on arc-consistency are almost a standard, path-consistency checking is often neglected because it is costly and it lters out pairs of assignments instead of single assignments. This paper presents a domain ltering procedure that tightly combines the use of arc and path-consistency, each one helping the other to achieve further or faster work. We show, on an experimental evaluation, that the proposed procedure ooers a considerable ltering power at relatively low cost.