Athanor: high-level local search over abstract constraint specifications in Essence

Saad Attieh, Nguyen Dang, Christopher Jefferson, Ian Miguel, Peter Nightingale

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

This paper presents Athanor, a novel local search solver that operates on abstract constraint specifications of combinatorial problems in the Essence language. It is unique in that it operates directly on the high level, nested types in Essence, such as set of partitions or multiset of sequences, without refining such types into low level representations. This approach has two main advantages. First, the structure present in the high level types allows high quality neighbourhoods for local search to be automatically derived. Second, it allows Athanor to scale much better than solvers that operate on the equivalent, but much larger, low-level representations. The paper details how Athanor operates, covering incremental evaluation, dynamic unrolling of quantified expressions and neighbourhood construction. A series of case studies show the performance of Athanor, benchmarked against several local search solvers on a range of problem classes.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-19)
EditorsSarit Kraus
PublisherInternational Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence
Pages1056-1063
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9780999241141
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 10 Aug 2019
EventTwenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-19) - Macao, China
Duration: 10 Aug 201916 Aug 2019
Conference number: 28
https://www.ijcai19.org/

Conference

ConferenceTwenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-19)
Abbreviated titleIJCAI-19
Country/TerritoryChina
CityMacao
Period10/08/1916/08/19
Internet address

Keywords

  • Constraints and SAT: Constraints: solvers and tools
  • Constraints and SAT: Modeling;formulation

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