Section: New Results

Reification of Global Constraints

Participants : Nicolas Beldiceanu, Mats Carlsson, Pierre Flener, Justin Pearson.

Being able expressing the negation of global constraints is something that is required in contexts such as testing the equivalence of two constraints models (see the PhD thesis of N. Lazaar ) or in the context of learning constraints . Motivated by that, we introduce a simple idea for deriving reified global constraints in a systematic way. It is based on the observation that most global constraints can be reformulated as a conjunction of total function constraints together with a constraint that can be easily reified.

The corresponding paper On the Reification of Global Constraints [12] was published in the Constraints journal. A companion technical report [35] provides such reifications for 82% of the constraints of the global constraint catalog [36] .