Symbolic Conflict Analysis in Pseudo-Boolean Optimization

Abstract

In the the last two decades, a lot of effort has been devoted to the development of satisfiability-checking tools for a variety of SAT-related problems. However, most of these tools lack optimization capabilities. That is, instead of finding any solution, one is sometimes interested in a solution that is best according to some criterion.
Pseudo-Boolean solvers can be used to deal with optimization by successively solving a series of problems that contain an additional pseudo-Boolean constraint expressing that a better solution is required. A key point for the success of this simple approach is that lemmas that are learned for one problem can be reused for subsequent ones.
In this paper we go one step further and show how, by using a simple symbolic conflict analysis procedure, not only can lemmas be reused between problems but also strengthened, thus further pruning the search space traversal. In addition, we show how this technique automatically allows one to infer upper bounds in maximization problems, thus giving an estimation of how far the solver is from finding an optimal solution. Experimental results with our PB solver reveal that (i) this technique is indeed effective in practice, providing important speedups in problems where several solutions are found and (ii) on problems with very few solutions, where the impact of our technique is limited, its overhead is negligible.