SUNNY: A lazy portfolio approach for constraint solving

Roberto Amadini, Maurizio Gabbrielli, Jacopo Mauro

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Within the context of constraint solving, a portfolio approach allows one to exploit the synergy between different solvers in order to create a globally better solver. In this paper we present SUNNY: a simple and flexible algorithm that takes advantage of a portfolio of constraint solvers in order to compute-without learning an explicit model-a schedule of them for solving a given Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). Motivated by the performance reached by SUNNY vs. different simulations of other state of the art approaches, we developed sunny-csp, an effective portfolio solver that exploits the underlying SUNNY algorithm in order to solve a given CSP. Empirical tests conducted on exhaustive benchmarks of MiniZinc models show that the actual performance of sunny-csp conforms to the predictions. This is encouraging both for improving the power of CSP portfolio solvers and for trying to export them to fields such as Answer Set Programming and Constraint Logic Programming.

Original languageEnglish
JournalTheory and Practice of Logic Programming
Volume14
Issue number4-5
Pages (from-to)509-524
Number of pages16
ISSN1471-0684
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1. Jul 2014
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Algorithms Portfolio
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Constraint Satisfaction
  • Machine Learning

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