Propagation via Kernelization: The Vertex Cover Constraint

The technique of kernelization consists in extracting, from an instance of a problem, an essentially equivalent instance whose size is bounded in a parameter k. Besides being the basis for efficient param-eterized algorithms, this method also provides a wealth of information to reason about in the context of constraint programming. We study the use of kernelization for designing propagators through the example of the Vertex Cover constraint. Since the classic kernelization rules often correspond to dominance rather than consistency, we introduce the notion of "loss-less" kernel. While our preliminary experimental results show the potential of the approach, they also show some of its limits. In particular, this method is more effective for vertex covers of large and sparse graphs, as they tend to have, relatively, smaller kernels.

The Dichotomy for Conservative Constraint Satisfaction is Polynomially Decidable

Given a fixed constraint language $\Gamma$, the conservative CSP over $\Gamma$ (denoted by c-CSP($\Gamma$)) is a variant of CSP($\Gamma$) where the domain of each variable can be restricted arbitrarily. A dichotomy is known for conservative CSP: for every fixed language $\Gamma$, c-CSP($\Gamma$) is either in P or NP-complete. However, the characterization of conservatively tractable languages is of algebraic nature and the naive recognition algorithm is super-exponential in the domain size. The main contribution of this paper is a polynomial-time algorithm that, given a constraint language $\Gamma$ as input, decides if c-CSP($\Gamma$) is tractable. In addition, if $\Gamma$ is proven tractable the algorithm also outputs its coloured graph, which contains valuable information on the structure of $\Gamma$.