SLS-enhanced core-boosted linear search for anytime maximum satisfiability

Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT), the constraint paradigm of minimizing a linear expression over Boolean (0-1) variables subject to a set of propositional clauses, is today used for solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems in various domains. Especially anytime MaxSAT solvers that compute low-cost solutions within a limited available computational time have significantly improved in recent years. Such solvers can be divided into SAT-based methods that use sophisticated reasoning, and stochastic local search (SLS) methods that heuristically explore the search space. The two are complementary; roughly speaking, SLS struggles with finding feasible solutions, and SAT-based methods with minimizing cost. Consequently, most state-of-the-art anytime MaxSAT solvers run SLS before a SAT-based algorithm with minimal communication between the two. In this paper, we aim to harness the complementary strengths of SAT-based, and SLS approaches in the context of anytime MaxSAT. More precisely, we describe several ways to enhance the performance of the so-called core-boosted linear search algorithm for anytime MaxSAT with SLS techniques. Core-boosted linear search is a three-phase algorithm where each phase uses different types of reasoning. Beyond MaxSAT, core-boosted search has also been successful in the related paradigms of pseudo-boolean optimization and constraint programming. We describe how an SLS approach to MaxSAT can be tightly integrated with all three phases of the algorithm, resulting in non-trivial information exchange in both directions between the SLS algorithm and the reasoning methods. We evaluate our techniques on standard benchmarks from the latest MaxSAT Evaluation and demonstrate that our techniques can noticeably improve on implementations of core-boosted search and SLS.

Subjects

Anytime Optimization

Maximum Satisfiability

MaxSAT

SAT

SLS

DDC Class

620: Engineering

More Funding Information

The work is supported by Research Council of Finland under grant 362987.

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SLS-enhanced core-boosted linear search for anytime maximum satisfiability