CONJURE: automatic generation of constraint models from problem specifications

Funding: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/V027182/1, EP/P015638/1), Royal Society (URF/R/180015).When solving a combinatorial problem, the formulation or model of the problem is critical tothe efficiency of the solver. Automating the modelling process has long been of interest because of the expertise and time required to produce an effective model of a given problem. We describe a method to automatically produce constraint models from a problem specification written in the abstract constraint specification language Essence. Our approach is to incrementally refine the specification into a concrete model by applying a chosen refinement rule at each step. Any nontrivial specification may be refined in multiple ways, creating a space of models to choose from. The handling of symmetries is a particularly important aspect of automated modelling. Many combinatorial optimisation problems contain symmetry, which can lead to redundant search. If a partial assignment is shown to be invalid, we are wasting time if we ever consider a symmetric equivalent of it. A particularly important class of symmetries are those introduced by the constraint modelling process: modelling symmetries. We show how modelling symmetries may be broken automatically as they enter a model during refinement, obviating the need for an expensive symmetry detection step following model formulation. Our approach is implemented in a system called Conjure. We compare the models producedby Conjure to constraint models from the literature that are known to be effective. Our empirical results confirm that Conjure can reproduce successfully the kernels of the constraint models of 42 benchmark problems found in the literature.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Spring Symposium on Practical Approaches to Scheduling and Planning

The symposium presented issues involved in the development of scheduling systems that can deal with resource and time limitations. To qualify, a system must be implemented and tested to some degree on non-trivial problems (ideally, on real-world problems). However, a system need not be fully deployed to qualify. Systems that schedule actions in terms of metric time constraints typically represent and reason about an external numeric clock or calendar and can be contrasted with those systems that represent time purely symbolically. The following topics are discussed: integrating planning and scheduling; integrating symbolic goals and numerical utilities; managing uncertainty; incremental rescheduling; managing limited computation time; anytime scheduling and planning algorithms, systems; dependency analysis and schedule reuse; management of schedule and plan execution; and incorporation of discrete event techniques

Methoden und Beschreibungssprachen zur Modellierung und Verifikation vonSchaltungen und Systemen: MBMV 2015 - Tagungsband, Chemnitz, 03. - 04. März 2015

Der Workshop Methoden und Beschreibungssprachen zur Modellierung und Verifikation von Schaltungen und Systemen (MBMV 2015) findet nun schon zum 18. mal statt. Ausrichter sind in diesem Jahr die Professur Schaltkreis- und Systementwurf der Technischen Universität Chemnitz und das Steinbeis-Forschungszentrum Systementwurf und Test. Der Workshop hat es sich zum Ziel gesetzt, neueste Trends, Ergebnisse und aktuelle Probleme auf dem Gebiet der Methoden zur Modellierung und Verifikation sowie der Beschreibungssprachen digitaler, analoger und Mixed-Signal-Schaltungen zu diskutieren. Er soll somit ein Forum zum Ideenaustausch sein. Weiterhin bietet der Workshop eine Plattform für den Austausch zwischen Forschung und Industrie sowie zur Pflege bestehender und zur Knüpfung neuer Kontakte. Jungen Wissenschaftlern erlaubt er, ihre Ideen und Ansätze einem breiten Publikum aus Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft zu präsentieren und im Rahmen der Veranstaltung auch fundiert zu diskutieren. Sein langjähriges Bestehen hat ihn zu einer festen Größe in vielen Veranstaltungskalendern gemacht. Traditionell sind auch die Treffen der ITGFachgruppen an den Workshop angegliedert. In diesem Jahr nutzen zwei im Rahmen der InnoProfile-Transfer-Initiative durch das Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung geförderte Projekte den Workshop, um in zwei eigenen Tracks ihre Forschungsergebnisse einem breiten Publikum zu präsentieren. Vertreter der Projekte Generische Plattform für Systemzuverlässigkeit und Verifikation (GPZV) und GINKO - Generische Infrastruktur zur nahtlosen energetischen Kopplung von Elektrofahrzeugen stellen Teile ihrer gegenwärtigen Arbeiten vor. Dies bereichert denWorkshop durch zusätzliche Themenschwerpunkte und bietet eine wertvolle Ergänzung zu den Beiträgen der Autoren. [... aus dem Vorwort

Proceedings of the Workshop on Change of Representation and Problem Reformulation

The proceedings of the third Workshop on Change of representation and Problem Reformulation is presented. In contrast to the first two workshops, this workshop was focused on analytic or knowledge-based approaches, as opposed to statistical or empirical approaches called 'constructive induction'. The organizing committee believes that there is a potential for combining analytic and inductive approaches at a future date. However, it became apparent at the previous two workshops that the communities pursuing these different approaches are currently interested in largely non-overlapping issues. The constructive induction community has been holding its own workshops, principally in conjunction with the machine learning conference. While this workshop is more focused on analytic approaches, the organizing committee has made an effort to include more application domains. We have greatly expanded from the origins in the machine learning community. Participants in this workshop come from the full spectrum of AI application domains including planning, qualitative physics, software engineering, knowledge representation, and machine learning

The 1993 Goddard Conference on Space Applications of Artificial Intelligence

This publication comprises the papers presented at the 1993 Goddard Conference on Space Applications of Artificial Intelligence held at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD on May 10-13, 1993. The purpose of this annual conference is to provide a forum in which current research and development directed at space applications of artificial intelligence can be presented and discussed

Computer Science and Technology Series : XV Argentine Congress of Computer Science. Selected papers

CACIC'09 was the fifteenth Congress in the CACIC series. It was organized by the School of Engineering of the National University of Jujuy. The Congress included 9 Workshops with 130 accepted papers, 1 main Conference, 4 invited tutorials, different meetings related with Computer Science Education (Professors, PhD students, Curricula) and an International School with 5 courses. CACIC 2009 was organized following the traditional Congress format, with 9 Workshops covering a diversity of dimensions of Computer Science Research. Each topic was supervised by a committee of three chairs of different Universities. The call for papers attracted a total of 267 submissions. An average of 2.7 review reports were collected for each paper, for a grand total of 720 review reports that involved about 300 different reviewers. A total of 130 full papers were accepted and 20 of them were selected for this book.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Elixir: synthesis of parallel irregular algorithms

Algorithms in new application areas like machine learning and data analytics usually operate on unstructured sparse graphs. Writing efficient parallel code to implement these algorithms is very challenging for a number of reasons. First, there may be many algorithms to solve a problem and each algorithm may have many implementations. Second, synchronization, which is necessary for correct parallel execution, introduces potential problems such as data-races and deadlocks. These issues interact in subtle ways, making the best solution dependent both on the parallel platform and on properties of the input graph. Consequently, implementing and selecting the best parallel solution can be a daunting task for non-experts, since we have few performance models for predicting the performance of parallel sparse graph programs on parallel hardware. This dissertation presents a synthesis methodology and a system, Elixir, that addresses these problems by (i) allowing programmers to specify solutions at a high level of abstraction, and (ii) generating many parallel implementations automatically and using search to find the best one. An Elixir specification consists of a set of operators capturing the main algorithm logic and a schedule specifying how to efficiently apply the operators. Elixir employs sophisticated automated reasoning to merge these two components, and uses techniques based on automated planning to insert synchronization and synthesize efficient parallel code. Experimental evaluation of our approach demonstrates that the performance of the Elixir generated code is competitive to, and can even outperform, hand-optimized code written by expert programmers for many interesting graph benchmarks.Computer Science