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Maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT), employing propositional logic as the declarative language of choice, has turned into a viable approach to solving NP-hard optimization problems arising from artificial intelligence and other real-world settings. A key contributing factor to the success of MaxSAT is the rise of increasingly effective exact solvers that are based on iterative calls to a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver. The three types of SAT-based MaxSAT solving approaches, each with its distinguishing features, implemented in current state-of-the-art MaxSAT solvers are the core-guided, the implicit hitting set (IHS), and the objective-bounding approaches. The objective-bounding approach is based on directly searching over the objective function range by iteratively querying a SAT solver if the MaxSAT instance at hand has a solution under different bounds on the objective. In contrast, both core-guided and IHS are so-called unsatisfiability-based approaches that employ a SAT solver as an unsatisfiable core extractor to determine sources of inconsistencies, but critically differ in how the found unsatisfiable cores are made use of towards finding a provably optimal solution. Furthermore, a variety of different algorithmic variants of the core-guided approach in particular have been proposed and implemented in solvers. It is well-acknowledged that each of the three approaches has its advantages and disadvantages, which is also witnessed by instance and problem-domain specific runtime performance differences (and at times similarities) of MaxSAT solvers implementing variants of the approaches. However, the questions of to what extent the approaches are fundamentally different and how the benefits of the individual methods could be combined in a single algorithmic approach are currently not fully understood. In this work, we approach these questions by developing UniMaxSAT, a general unifying algorithmic framework. Based on the recent notion of abstract cores, UniMaxSAT captures in general core-guided, IHS and objective-bounding computations. The framework offers a unified way of establishing quite generally the correctness of the current approaches. We illustrate this by formally showing that UniMaxSAT can simulate the computations of various algorithmic instantiations of the three types of MaxSAT solving approaches. Furthermore, UniMaxSAT can be instantiated in novel ways giving rise to new algorithmic variants of the approaches. We illustrate this aspect by developing a prototype implementation of an algorithmic variant for MaxSAT based on the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The declarative approach is key to efficiently finding optimal solutions to various types of NP-hard real-world combinatorial optimization problems. Most work on practical declarative solvers—ranging from classical integer programming to finite-domain constraint optimization and maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT)—has focused on optimization under a single objective; fewer advances have been made towards efficient declarative techniques for multi-objective optimization problems. Motivated by significant recent advances in practical solvers for MaxSAT, in this work we develop BiOptSat, an exact declarative approach for finding Pareto-optimal solutions to bi-objective optimization problems, with propositional logic as the underlying constraint language. BiOptSat can be viewed as an instantiation of the lexicographic method. The approach makes use of a single Boolean satisfiability solver that is incrementally employed throughout the entire search procedure, allowing for finding a single Pareto-optimal solution, finding one representative solution for each non-dominated point, and enumerating all Pareto-optimal solutions. We detail several algorithmic instantiations of BiOptSat, each building on recent algorithms proposed for single-objective MaxSAT. We empirically evaluate the instantiations compared to recently-proposed alternative approaches to multi-objective MaxSAT solving on several real-world domains from the literature, showing the practical benefits of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The BT algorithm of Bouchitté and Todinca based on enumerating potential maximal cliques, originally proposed for the treewidth and minimum fill-in problems, yields improved exact exponential-time algorithms for various graph optimization problems related to optimal triangulations. While the BT algorithm has received significant attention in terms of theoretical analysis, less attention has been paid on engineering efficient implementations of the algorithm for different problems and thereby on empirical studies on its effectiveness in practice. In this work, we provide an experimental evaluation of an implementation of the BT algorithm, based on our second-place winning entry in the 2nd Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge (PACE 2017), extended to several related graph problems: treewidth, minimum fill-in, generalized and fractional hypertreewidth, and the total table size problem. Instead of focusing on problem-specific optimization of BT for a particular problem, our focus in this work is on studying the applicability of BT more generally to a range of problems. Based on the results, we conclude that an efficient implementation of the BT algorithm yields an empirically competitive approach to each of the considered problems when compared to available implementations of alternative problem-specific algorithmic approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]