Using Local Search to Find \MSSes and MUSes

International audienceIn this paper, a new complete technique to compute Maximal Satisfiable Subsets (MSSes) and Minimally Unsatisfiable Subformulas (MUSes) of sets of Boolean clauses is introduced. The approach improves the currently most efficient complete technique in several ways. It makes use of the powerful concept of critical clause and of a computationally inexpensive local search oracle to boost an exhaustive algorithm proposed by Liffiton and Sakallah. These features can allow exponential efficiency gains to be obtained. Accordingly, experimental studies show that this new approach outperforms the best current existing exhaustive ones

Inconsistency Measurement based on Variables in Minimal Unsatisfiable Subsets

International audienceMeasuring inconsistency degrees of knowledge bases (KBs) provides important context information for facilitating inconsistency handling. Several semantic and syntax based measures have been proposed separately. In this paper, we propose a new way to define inconsistency measurements by combining semantic and syntax based approaches. It is based on counting the variables of minimal unsatisfiable subsets (MUSes) and minimal correction subsets (MCSes), which leads to two equivalent inconsistency degrees, named IDMUS and IDMCS. We give the theoretical and experimental comparisons between them and two purely semantic-based inconsistency degrees: 4-valued and the Quasi Classical semantics based inconsistency degrees. More- over, the computational complexities related to our new inconsistency measurements are studied. As it turns out that computing the exact inconsistency degrees is intractable in general, we then propose and evaluate an anytime algorithm to make IDMUS and IDMCS usable in knowledge management applications. In particular, as most of syntax based measures tend to be difficult to compute in reality due to the exponential number of MUSes, our new inconsistency measures are practical because the numbers of variables in MUSes are often limited or easily to be approximated. We evaluate our approach on the DC benchmark. Our encourag- ing experimental results show that these new inconsistency measure- ments or their approximations are efficient to handle large knowledge bases and to better distinguish inconsistent knowledge bases

Incremental Cardinality Constraints for MaxSAT

Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) is an optimization variant of the Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) problem. In general, MaxSAT algorithms perform a succession of SAT solver calls to reach an optimum solution making extensive use of cardinality constraints. Many of these algorithms are non-incremental in nature, i.e. at each iteration the formula is rebuilt and no knowledge is reused from one iteration to another. In this paper, we exploit the knowledge acquired across iterations using novel schemes to use cardinality constraints in an incremental fashion. We integrate these schemes with several MaxSAT algorithms. Our experimental results show a significant performance boost for these algo- rithms as compared to their non-incremental counterparts. These results suggest that incremental cardinality constraints could be beneficial for other constraint solving domains.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Final version published in Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP) 201