A Framework for Certified Boolean Branch-and-Bound Optimization

  • Authors:
  • Javier Larrosa;Robert Nieuwenhuis;Albert Oliveras;Enric Rodríguez-Carbonell

  • Affiliations:
  • Technical Univ. of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain;Technical Univ. of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain;Technical Univ. of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain;Technical Univ. of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Automated Reasoning
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We consider optimization problems of the form (S, cost), where S is a clause set over Boolean variables x 1驴...驴x n , with an arbitrary cost function $\mathit{cost}\colon \mathbb{B}^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ , and the aim is to find a model A of S such that cost(A) is minimized. Here we study the generation of proofs of optimality in the context of branch-and-bound procedures for such problems. For this purpose we introduce $\mathtt{DPLL_{BB}}$ , an abstract DPLL-based branch-and-bound algorithm that can model optimization concepts such as cost-based propagation and cost-based backjumping. Most, if not all, SAT-related optimization problems are in the scope of $\mathtt{DPLL_{BB}}$ . Since many of the existing approaches for solving these problems can be seen as instances, $\mathtt{DPLL_{BB}}$ allows one to formally reason about them in a simple way and exploit the enhancements of $\mathtt{DPLL_{BB}}$ given here, in particular its uniform method for generating independently verifiable optimality proofs.