English

Efficient Incremental Modelling and Solving

Artificial Intelligence 2020-09-24 v1

Abstract

In various scenarios, a single phase of modelling and solving is either not sufficient or not feasible to solve the problem at hand. A standard approach to solving AI planning problems, for example, is to incrementally extend the planning horizon and solve the problem of trying to find a plan of a particular length. Indeed, any optimization problem can be solved as a sequence of decision problems in which the objective value is incrementally updated. Another example is constraint dominance programming (CDP), in which search is organized into a sequence of levels. The contribution of this work is to enable a native interaction between SAT solvers and the automated modelling system Savile Row to support efficient incremental modelling and solving. This allows adding new decision variables, posting new constraints and removing existing constraints (via assumptions) between incremental steps. Two additional benefits of the native coupling of modelling and solving are the ability to retain learned information between SAT solver calls and to enable SAT assumptions, further improving flexibility and efficiency. Experiments on one optimisation problem and five pattern mining tasks demonstrate that the native interaction between the modelling system and SAT solver consistently improves performance significantly.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2009.11111,
  title  = {Efficient Incremental Modelling and Solving},
  author = {Gökberk Koçak and Özgür Akgün and Nguyen Dang and Ian Miguel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.11111},
  year   = {2020}
}