4 research outputs found
Feature-based tuning of simulated annealing applied to the curriculum-based course timetabling problem
We consider the university course timetabling problem, which is one of the
most studied problems in educational timetabling. In particular, we focus our
attention on the formulation known as the curriculum-based course timetabling
problem, which has been tackled by many researchers and for which there are
many available benchmarks.
The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we propose an effective and
robust single-stage simulated annealing method for solving the problem.
Secondly, we design and apply an extensive and statistically-principled
methodology for the parameter tuning procedure. The outcome of this analysis is
a methodology for modeling the relationship between search method parameters
and instance features that allows us to set the parameters for unseen instances
on the basis of a simple inspection of the instance itself. Using this
methodology, our algorithm, despite its apparent simplicity, has been able to
achieve high quality results on a set of popular benchmarks.
A final contribution of the paper is a novel set of real-world instances,
which could be used as a benchmark for future comparison
Learning Weak Constraints in Answer Set Programming
This paper contributes to the area of inductive logic programming by
presenting a new learning framework that allows the learning of weak
constraints in Answer Set Programming (ASP). The framework, called Learning
from Ordered Answer Sets, generalises our previous work on learning ASP
programs without weak constraints, by considering a new notion of examples as
ordered pairs of partial answer sets that exemplify which answer sets of a
learned hypothesis (together with a given background knowledge) are preferred
to others. In this new learning task inductive solutions are searched within a
hypothesis space of normal rules, choice rules, and hard and weak constraints.
We propose a new algorithm, ILASP2, which is sound and complete with respect to
our new learning framework. We investigate its applicability to learning
preferences in an interview scheduling problem and also demonstrate that when
restricted to the task of learning ASP programs without weak constraints,
ILASP2 can be much more efficient than our previously proposed system.Comment: To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP),
Proceedings of ICLP 201
Boosting Answer Set Optimization with Weighted Comparator Networks
Answer set programming (ASP) is a paradigm for modeling knowledge intensive
domains and solving challenging reasoning problems. In ASP solving, a typical
strategy is to preprocess problem instances by rewriting complex rules into
simpler ones. Normalization is a rewriting process that removes extended rule
types altogether in favor of normal rules. Recently, such techniques led to
optimization rewriting in ASP, where the goal is to boost answer set
optimization by refactoring the optimization criteria of interest. In this
paper, we present a novel, general, and effective technique for optimization
rewriting based on comparator networks, which are specific kinds of circuits
for reordering the elements of vectors. The idea is to connect an ASP encoding
of a comparator network to the literals being optimized and to redistribute the
weights of these literals over the structure of the network. The encoding
captures information about the weight of an answer set in auxiliary atoms in a
structured way that is proven to yield exponential improvements during
branch-and-bound optimization on an infinite family of example programs. The
used comparator network can be tuned freely, e.g., to find the best size for a
given benchmark class. Experiments show accelerated optimization performance on
several benchmark problems.Comment: 36 page