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Solving the minimum-cost satisfiability problem using SAT based branch-and-bound search

Published: 05 November 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) has seen many successful applications in various fields, such as Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, in some cases it may be required/preferable to use variations of the general SAT problem. In this paper we consider one important variation, the Minimum-Cost Satisfiability Problem (MinCostSAT). MinCostSAT is a SAT problem which minimizes the cost of the satisfying assignment. MinCostSAT has various applications, e.g. Automatic Test Pattern Generation (ATPG), FPGA Routing, AI Planning, etc. This problem has been tackled before - first by covering algorithms, e.g. scherzo [3], and more recently by SAT based algorithms, e.g. bsolo [16]. However the SAT algorithms they are based on are not the current generation of highly efficient solvers. The solvers in this generation, e.g. Chaff [20], MiniSat [5] etc., incorporate several new advances, e.g. two literal watching based Boolean Constraint Propagation, that have delivered order of magnitude speedups. We first point out the challenges in using this class of solvers for the MinCostSAT problem and then present techniques to overcome these challenges. The resulting solver MinCostChaff shows order of magnitude improvement over several current best known branch-and-bound solvers for a large class of problems, ranging from Minimum Test Pattern Generation, Bounded Model Checking in EDA to Graph Coloring and Planning in AI.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICCAD '06: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design
    November 2006
    147 pages
    ISBN:1595933891
    DOI:10.1145/1233501
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    Published: 05 November 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. Boolean satisfiability
    2. MinCostSAT
    3. branch-and-bound
    4. optimization

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    • (2014)A SAT-based approach to cost-sensitive temporally expressive planningACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/2542182.25422005:1(1-35)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2014
    • (2014)Encoding Linear Constraints into SATPrinciples and Practice of Constraint Programming10.1007/978-3-319-10428-7_9(75-91)Online publication date: 2014
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