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On Dedicated CDCL Strategies for PB Solvers

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Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing – SAT 2021 (SAT 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 12831))

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Abstract

Current implementations of pseudo-Boolean (PB) solvers working on native PB constraints are based on the CDCL architecture which empowers highly efficient modern SAT solvers. In particular, such PB solvers not only implement a (cutting-planes-based) conflict analysis procedure, but also complementary strategies for components that are crucial for the efficiency of CDCL, namely branching heuristics, learned constraint deletion and restarts. However, these strategies are mostly reused by PB solvers without considering the particular form of the PB constraints they deal with. In this paper, we present and evaluate different ways of adapting CDCL strategies to take the specificities of PB constraints into account while preserving the behavior they have in the clausal setting. We implemented these strategies in two different solvers, namely Sat4j (for which we consider three configurations) and RoundingSat. Our experiments show that these dedicated strategies allow to improve, sometimes significantly, the performance of these solvers, both on decision and optimization problems.

R. Wallon—Most of this paper is based on research conducted by this author while he was working as a PhD student at CRIL (Univ Artois & CNRS).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://gitlab.ow2.org/sat4j/sat4j/tree/cdcl-strategies

  2. 2.

    https://gitlab.com/pb-cdcl-strategies/roundingsat/-/tree/cdcl-strategies

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Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their numerous comments, that greatly helped to improve the paper. Part of this work was supported by the French Ministry for Higher Education and Research and the Hauts-de-France Regional Council through the “Contrat de Plan État Région (CPER) DATA”. This publication was supported by the Chair “Integrated Urban Mobility”, backed by L’X – École Polytechnique and La Fondation de l’École Polytechnique and sponsored by Uber. The Partners of the Chair shall not under any circumstances accept any liability for the content of this publication, for which the author shall be solely liable.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Lens (CRIL), Univ. Artois, CNRS, 62300, Lens, France

    Daniel Le Berre

  2. LIX, Laboratoire d’Informatique de l’X, Ecole Polytechnique, X-Uber Chair, 91120, Palaiseau, France

    Romain Wallon

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  1. Daniel Le Berre
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Correspondence to Romain Wallon .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire MIS, University of Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France

    Chu-Min Li

  2. IIIA-CSIC, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain

    Felip Manyà

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Le Berre, D., Wallon, R. (2021). On Dedicated CDCL Strategies for PB Solvers. In: Li, CM., Manyà, F. (eds) Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing – SAT 2021. SAT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12831. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80223-3_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80223-3_22

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-80223-3

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