Fixarrange

Fixarrange is a term used in computer science to describe methods and tools for repairing or enforcing a valid arrangement of elements within a sequence, layout, or graph. In practice, fixarrange refers to algorithms that detect violations of an intended arrangement—such as a sorted order, a prescribed adjacency, or a canonical layout—and apply edits to restore validity after edits, merges, corruption, or external perturbations.

The core problem is to transform an input arrangement into one that satisfies a given set of constraints while minimizing changes. Common techniques include swap-based repairs (local reordering by exchanging neighboring items), constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) based repairs (systematically enforcing constraints), and graph-based reordering (reconstructing a layout or sequence from connectivity information). Heuristic and optimization methods are often used to balance constraint satisfaction with minimal disruption, typically measured by edit distance or permutation distance (for example Kendall tau distance).

Typical applications span user interface layout managers that automatically reflow content, genome assembly and bioinformatics pipelines that must order contigs, scheduling and timetabling, database deduplication and record reconciliation, and data-cleaning workflows that require consistent permutations after merges.

Computationally, the complexity of fixarrange methods depends on the constraint set. Some instances are solvable in polynomial time; many general formulations are NP-hard, so practical tools rely on heuristics, approximations, or domain-specific rules.

Origin and usage: the term appears in data-cleaning and constraint-programming contexts in the early 2000s and has since been used in various disciplines to describe permutation repair and layout correction techniques. See also data cleaning, constraint programming, permutation repair, and layout optimization.