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Improving Conflict Analysis in MIP Solvers by Pseudo-Boolean Reasoning

Authors Gioni Mexi , Timo Berthold , Ambros Gleixner , Jakob Nordström

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Author Details

Gioni Mexi
  • Zuse Institute Berlin, Germany
Timo Berthold
  • Fair Isaac Deutschland GmbH, Berlin, Germany
  • TU Berlin, Germany
Ambros Gleixner
  • HTW Berlin, Germany
  • Zuse Institute Berlin, Germany
Jakob Nordström
  • University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Lund University, Sweden

Funding

The work for this article has been conducted within the Research Campus Modal funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF grant numbers 05M14ZAM, 05M20ZBM).
  • Nordström, Jakob: supported by the Swedish Research Council grant 2016-00782 and the Independent Research Fund Denmark grant 9040-00389B.

Acknowledgements

Part of this work was carried out while some of the authors participated in the extended reunion for the program Satisfiability: Theory, Practice, and Beyond at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley in the spring of 2023. This work has also benefited greatly from discussions during the Dagstuhl Seminar 22411 Theory and Practice of SAT and Combinatorial Solving.

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Gioni Mexi, Timo Berthold, Ambros Gleixner, and Jakob Nordström. Improving Conflict Analysis in MIP Solvers by Pseudo-Boolean Reasoning. In 29th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 280, pp. 27:1-27:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CP.2023.27

Abstract

Conflict analysis has been successfully generalized from Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solving to mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers, but although MIP solvers operate with general linear inequalities, the conflict analysis in MIP has been limited to reasoning with the more restricted class of clausal constraint. This is in contrast to how conflict analysis is performed in so-called pseudo-Boolean solving, where solvers can reason directly with 0-1 integer linear inequalities rather than with clausal constraints extracted from such inequalities.
In this work, we investigate how pseudo-Boolean conflict analysis can be integrated in MIP solving, focusing on 0-1 integer linear programs (0-1 ILPs). Phrased in MIP terminology, conflict analysis can be understood as a sequence of linear combinations and cuts. We leverage this perspective to design a new conflict analysis algorithm based on mixed integer rounding (MIR) cuts, which theoretically dominates the state-of-the-art division-based method in pseudo-Boolean solving.
We also report results from a first proof-of-concept implementation of different pseudo-Boolean conflict analysis methods in the open-source MIP solver SCIP. When evaluated on a large and diverse set of 0-1 ILP instances from MIPLIB2017, our new MIR-based conflict analysis outperforms both previous pseudo-Boolean methods and the clause-based method used in MIP. Our conclusion is that pseudo-Boolean conflict analysis in MIP is a promising research direction that merits further study, and that it might also make sense to investigate the use of such conflict analysis to generate stronger no-goods in constraint programming.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Discrete optimization
  • Mathematics of computing → Solvers
Keywords
  • Integer programming
  • pseudo-Boolean solving
  • conflict analysis
  • cutting planes proof system
  • mixed integer rounding
  • division
  • saturation

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