A non-binary constraint ordering heuristic for constraint satisfaction problems

Furthermore, the order in which constraints are studied can improve efficiency, particularly in problems with non-binary constraints. In this paper, we present a preprocess heuristic called constraint ordering heuristic (COH) that studies the constrainedness of the scheduling problem and mainly classifies the constraints so that the tightest ones are studied first. Thus, constrainedness can be known in advance and overall inconsistencies can be found earlier and the number of constraint checks can significantly be reduced.