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meSAT: multiple encodings of CSP to SAT

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Abstract

One approach for solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP) (and related Constraint Optimization Problems (COP)) involving integer and Boolean variables is reduction to propositional satisfiability problem (SAT). A number of encodings (e.g., direct, log, support, order) for this purpose exist as well as specific encodings for some constraints that are often encountered (e.g., cardinality constraints, global constraints). However, there is no single encoding that performs well on all classes of problems and there is a need for a system that supports multiple encodings. We present a system that translates specifications of finite linear CSP problems into SAT instances using several well-known encodings, and their combinations. We also present a methodology for selecting a suitable encoding based on simple syntactic features of the input CSP instance. Thorough evaluation has been performed on large publicly available corpora and our encoding selection method improves upon the efficiency of existing encodings and state-of-the-art tools used in comparison.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Mathematics, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia

    Mirko Stojadinović & Filip Marić

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  1. Mirko Stojadinović
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  2. Filip Marić
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Correspondence to Mirko Stojadinović.

Additional information

This work was partially supported by the Serbian Ministry of Science grant 174021 and by SNF grant SCOPES IZ73Z0_127979/1.

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Stojadinović, M., Marić, F. meSAT: multiple encodings of CSP to SAT. Constraints 19, 380–403 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10601-014-9165-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10601-014-9165-7

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