Partial symmetry breaking by local search in the group

  • Authors:

  • Steve D. Prestwich;Brahim Hnich;Helmut Simonis;Roberto Rossi;S. Armagan Tarim

  • Affiliations:

  • Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Department of Computer Science, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland;Department of Computer Engineering, Izmir University of Economics, Izmir, Turkey;Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Department of Computer Science, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland;Business School, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK;Department of Management, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

  • Venue:
  • Constraints
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The presence of symmetry in constraint satisfaction problems can cause a great deal of wasted search effort, and several methods for breaking symmetries have been reported. In this paper we describe a new method called Symmetry Breaking by Nonstationary Optimisation, which interleaves local search in the symmetry group with backtrack search on the constraint problem. It can be tuned to break each symmetry with an arbitrarily high probability with high runtime overhead, or as a lightweight but still powerful method with low runtime overhead. It has negligible memory requirement, it combines well with static lex-leader constraints, and its benefit increases with problem hardness.