24,252 research outputs found
Meta-model Pruning
Large and complex meta-models such as those of Uml and its profiles are growing due to modelling and inter-operability needs of numerous\ud
stakeholders. The complexity of such meta-models has led to coining\ud
of the term meta-muddle. Individual users often exercise only a small\ud
view of a meta-muddle for tasks ranging from model creation to construction\ud
of model transformations. What is the effective meta-model that represents\ud
this view? We present a flexible meta-model pruning algorithm and\ud
tool to extract effective meta-models from a meta-muddle. We use\ud
the notion of model typing for meta-models to verify that the algorithm\ud
generates a super-type of the large meta-model representing the meta-muddle.\ud
This implies that all programs written using the effective meta-model\ud
will work for the meta-muddle hence preserving backward compatibility.\ud
All instances of the effective meta-model are also instances of the\ud
meta-muddle. We illustrate how pruning the original Uml metamodel\ud
produces different effective meta-models
An Overview of Backtrack Search Satisfiability Algorithms
Propositional Satisfiability (SAT) is often used as the underlying model for a significan
The power of linear programming for general-valued CSPs
Let , called the domain, be a fixed finite set and let , called
the valued constraint language, be a fixed set of functions of the form
, where different functions might have
different arity . We study the valued constraint satisfaction problem
parametrised by , denoted by VCSP. These are minimisation
problems given by variables and the objective function given by a sum of
functions from , each depending on a subset of the variables.
Finite-valued constraint languages contain functions that take on only rational
values and not infinite values.
Our main result is a precise algebraic characterisation of valued constraint
languages whose instances can be solved exactly by the basic linear programming
relaxation (BLP). For a valued constraint language , BLP is a decision
procedure for if and only if admits a symmetric fractional
polymorphism of every arity. For a finite-valued constraint language ,
BLP is a decision procedure if and only if admits a symmetric
fractional polymorphism of some arity, or equivalently, if admits a
symmetric fractional polymorphism of arity 2.
Using these results, we obtain tractability of several novel classes of
problems, including problems over valued constraint languages that are: (1)
submodular on arbitrary lattices; (2) -submodular on arbitrary finite
domains; (3) weakly (and hence strongly) tree-submodular on arbitrary trees.Comment: A full version of a FOCS'12 paper by the last two authors
(arXiv:1204.1079) and an ICALP'13 paper by the first author (arXiv:1207.7213)
to appear in SIAM Journal on Computing (SICOMP
Satisfiability Modulo ODEs
We study SMT problems over the reals containing ordinary differential
equations. They are important for formal verification of realistic hybrid
systems and embedded software. We develop delta-complete algorithms for SMT
formulas that are purely existentially quantified, as well as exists-forall
formulas whose universal quantification is restricted to the time variables. We
demonstrate scalability of the algorithms, as implemented in our open-source
solver dReal, on SMT benchmarks with several hundred nonlinear ODEs and
variables.Comment: Published in FMCAD 201
Branch-and-Prune Search Strategies for Numerical Constraint Solving
When solving numerical constraints such as nonlinear equations and
inequalities, solvers often exploit pruning techniques, which remove redundant
value combinations from the domains of variables, at pruning steps. To find the
complete solution set, most of these solvers alternate the pruning steps with
branching steps, which split each problem into subproblems. This forms the
so-called branch-and-prune framework, well known among the approaches for
solving numerical constraints. The basic branch-and-prune search strategy that
uses domain bisections in place of the branching steps is called the bisection
search. In general, the bisection search works well in case (i) the solutions
are isolated, but it can be improved further in case (ii) there are continuums
of solutions (this often occurs when inequalities are involved). In this paper,
we propose a new branch-and-prune search strategy along with several variants,
which not only allow yielding better branching decisions in the latter case,
but also work as well as the bisection search does in the former case. These
new search algorithms enable us to employ various pruning techniques in the
construction of inner and outer approximations of the solution set. Our
experiments show that these algorithms speed up the solving process often by
one order of magnitude or more when solving problems with continuums of
solutions, while keeping the same performance as the bisection search when the
solutions are isolated.Comment: 43 pages, 11 figure
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