Combinatorial Search: From Algorithms to Systems

Although they are believed to be unsolvable in general, tractability results suggest that some practical NP-hard problems can be efficiently solved. Combinatorial search algorithms are designed to efficiently explore the usually large solution space of these instances by reducing the search space to feasible regions and using heuristics to efficiently explore these regions. Various mathematical formalisms may be used to express and tackle combinatorial problems, among them the constraint sa...