Filtering for Subgraph Isomorphism

A subgraph isomorphism problem consists in deciding if there exists a copy of a pattern graph in a target graph. We introduce in this paper a filtering algorithm dedicated to this problem. The main idea is to label every node with respect to its relationships with other nodes of the graph, and to define a partial order on these labels in order to express compatibility of labels for subgraph isomorphism. This partial order over labels is used to filter domains. Labelings can also be strengthened by adding information from the labels of the neighbors. Such a strengthening can be applied iteratively until a fixpoint is reached. Practical experiments illustrate that our new filtering approach is more effective on difficult instances of scale free graphs than state-of-the-art algorithms and other CP approaches.