16,432 research outputs found
Postponing Branching Decisions
Solution techniques for Constraint Satisfaction and Optimisation Problems
often make use of backtrack search methods, exploiting variable and value
ordering heuristics. In this paper, we propose and analyse a very simple method
to apply in case the value ordering heuristic produces ties: postponing the
branching decision. To this end, we group together values in a tie, branch on
this sub-domain, and defer the decision among them to lower levels of the
search tree. We show theoretically and experimentally that this simple
modification can dramatically improve the efficiency of the search strategy.
Although in practise similar methods may have been applied already, to our
knowledge, no empirical or theoretical study has been proposed in the
literature to identify when and to what extent this strategy should be used.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure
Solving Assembly Line Balancing Problems by Combining IP and CP
Assembly line balancing problems consist in partitioning the work necessary
to assemble a number of products among different stations of an assembly line.
We present a hybrid approach for solving such problems, which combines
constraint programming and integer programming.Comment: 10 pages, Sixth Annual Workshop of the ERCIM Working Group on
Constraints, Prague, June 200
Parallel Graph Partitioning for Complex Networks
Processing large complex networks like social networks or web graphs has
recently attracted considerable interest. In order to do this in parallel, we
need to partition them into pieces of about equal size. Unfortunately, previous
parallel graph partitioners originally developed for more regular mesh-like
networks do not work well for these networks. This paper addresses this problem
by parallelizing and adapting the label propagation technique originally
developed for graph clustering. By introducing size constraints, label
propagation becomes applicable for both the coarsening and the refinement phase
of multilevel graph partitioning. We obtain very high quality by applying a
highly parallel evolutionary algorithm to the coarsened graph. The resulting
system is both more scalable and achieves higher quality than state-of-the-art
systems like ParMetis or PT-Scotch. For large complex networks the performance
differences are very big. For example, our algorithm can partition a web graph
with 3.3 billion edges in less than sixteen seconds using 512 cores of a high
performance cluster while producing a high quality partition -- none of the
competing systems can handle this graph on our system.Comment: Review article. Parallelization of our previous approach
arXiv:1402.328
Orbitopal Fixing
The topic of this paper are integer programming models in which a subset of
0/1-variables encode a partitioning of a set of objects into disjoint subsets.
Such models can be surprisingly hard to solve by branch-and-cut algorithms if
the order of the subsets of the partition is irrelevant, since this kind of
symmetry unnecessarily blows up the search tree. We present a general tool,
called orbitopal fixing, for enhancing the capabilities of branch-and-cut
algorithms in solving such symmetric integer programming models. We devise a
linear time algorithm that, applied at each node of the search tree, removes
redundant parts of the tree produced by the above mentioned symmetry. The
method relies on certain polyhedra, called orbitopes, which have been
introduced bei Kaibel and Pfetsch (Math. Programm. A, 114 (2008), 1-36). It
does, however, not explicitly add inequalities to the model. Instead, it uses
certain fixing rules for variables. We demonstrate the computational power of
orbitopal fixing at the example of a graph partitioning problem.Comment: 22 pages, revised and extended version of a previous version that has
appeared under the same title in Proc. IPCO 200
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