Compact Modeling in Constraint Programming with Hybrid Tables

Christophe Lecoutre; Mouny Samy Modeliar; Gilles Audemard; Nicolas Paris; Nicolas Szczepanski

IJCAI 20260 citations

Compact Modeling in Constraint Programming with Hybrid Tables

Christophe Lecoutre, Mouny Samy Modeliar, Gilles Audemard, Nicolas Paris, Nicolas Szczepanski

Abstract

Hybrid tables, also referred to as `smart' in the literature, represent a valuable modeling technique within Constraint Programming (CP). These tables allow us to handle disjunctive cases (constraining expressions) in a compact and structured way, by authorizing tuples (table entries) to contain simple unary and binary arithmetic restrictions (similar to internal constraints). In this paper, we show the practical interest of using hybrid tables for planning-like combinatorial puzzles, when the transition from one state to the next can be encoded by a single hybrid table. Experimental results show that these hybrid models exhibit greater compactness and efficiency in solving compared to their conventional counterparts.

Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Constraint optimization problemsConstraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Constraint programmingConstraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Constraint satisfactionConstraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Modeling

BibTeX

@inproceedings{ijcai2026_compactmodelingi,
  title = {Compact Modeling in Constraint Programming with Hybrid Tables},
  author = {Christophe Lecoutre and Mouny Samy Modeliar and Gilles Audemard and Nicolas Paris and Nicolas Szczepanski},
  booktitle = {IJCAI 2026},
  year = {2026}
}