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A computational comparison of symmetry handling methods for mixed integer programs

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Abstract

The handling of symmetries in mixed integer programs in order to speed up the solution process of branch-and-cut solvers has recently received significant attention, both in theory and practice. This paper compares different methods for handling symmetries using a common implementation framework. We start by investigating the computation of symmetries and analyze the symmetries present in the MIPLIB 2010 instances. It turns out that many instances are affected by symmetry and most symmetry groups contain full symmetric groups as factors. We then present (variants of) six symmetry handling methods from the literature. Their implementation is tested on several testsets. On very symmetric instances used previously in the literature, it is essential to use methods like isomorphism pruning, orbital fixing, or orbital branching. Moreover, tests on the MIPLIB instances show that isomorphism pruning, orbital fixing, or adding symmetry breaking inequalities allow to speed-up the solution process by about 15% and more instances can be solved within the time limit.

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  1. Available at http://ahmed.ghoniem.info/download/symmetry.zip.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Tobias Achterberg for interesting discussions on the topic and Christopher Hojny for helpful comments. We also thank the editor and referees for their helpful comments that helped to improve this paper. Furthermore, the first author acknowledges support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Collaborative Research Center 666.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fachbereich Mathematik, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Dolivostrasse 15, 64293, Darmstadt, Germany

    Marc E. Pfetsch

  2. initOS GmbH, Hegelstrasse 28, 39104, Magdeburg, Germany

    Thomas Rehn

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  1. Marc E. Pfetsch
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Correspondence to Marc E. Pfetsch.

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Appendix: List of MIPLIB 2010 symmetries

Appendix: List of MIPLIB 2010 symmetries

The following Table 19 lists details about the symmetry groups of MIPLIB 2010 instances. The second column shows the logarithm to the base 10 of the order of the symmetry groups. The third column presents the percentage of variables that lie in an orbit of at least size two, i.e., variables on which the symmetry group acts non-trivially. The fourth column shows the groups which the symmetry group is a direct product of. The following notation is used:

  • \(\mathcal {S}_{k}\) denotes a symmetric group of degree k in coordinate action;

  • \(M({G},{\ell })\) represents the matrix action of group G on \(\ell \) points.

  • “unknown” denotes groups whose type could not be determined by PermLib.

The computations for this table were performed on an Intel i7 CPU with 3.40 GHz and 32 GB of memory and a time limit of 10 h. For some instances, the computation or analysis ran into the memory or time limit. These instances are marked with “–”. Instances without symmetry are not shown.

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Pfetsch, M.E., Rehn, T. A computational comparison of symmetry handling methods for mixed integer programs. Math. Prog. Comp. 11, 37–93 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12532-018-0140-y

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