Finding Diverse and Similar Solutions in Constraint Programming

Emmanuel Hebrard, Brahim Hnich, Barry O'Sullivan, Toby Walsh

Abstract: It is useful in a wide range of situations to find solutions which are diverse (or similar) to each other. We therefore define a number of different classes of diversity and similarity problems. For example, what is the most diverse set of solutions of a constraint satisfaction problem with a given cardinality? We first determine the computational complexity of these problems. We then propose a number of practical solution methods, some of which use global constraints for enforcing diversity (or similarity) between solutions. Empirical evaluation on a number of problems show promising results.