Pruning for the Minimum Constraint Family and for the Number of Distinct Values Constraint Family

The paper presents propagation rules that are common to the minimum constraint family and to the number of distinct values constraint family. One original contribution is to provide a geometrical interpretation of these rules that can be used by a generic sweep pruning algorithm. Finally one practical interest of the paper is to describe an implementation of the number of distinct values constraint. This is a quite common counting constraint that one encounters in many practical applications such as timetabling or frequency allocation problems.