Abstract
We present a method for solving weighted Constraint Satisfaction Problems, based on translation into a Constraint Optimization Problem and iterative calls to an SMT solver, with successively tighter bounds of the objective function. The novelty of the method herewith described lies in representing the bound constraint as a shared Binary Decision Diagram, which in turn is translated into SAT. This offers two benefits: first, BDDs built for previous bounds can be used to build the BDDs for new (tighter) bounds, considerably reducing the BDD construction time; second, as a by-product, many clauses asserted to the solver in previous iterations can be reused.
The reported experimentation on the WSimply system shows that this technique has better performance in general than other methods implemented in the system. Moreover, with the new technique WSimply outperforms some state-of-the-art solvers in most of the studied instances.
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Bofill, M., Palahí, M., Suy, J., Villaret, M. (2014). Solving Intensional Weighted CSPs by Incremental Optimization with BDDs. In: O’Sullivan, B. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8656. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10428-7_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10428-7_17
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