SUNNY: a Lazy Portfolio Approach for Constraint Solving. Issue 4 (21st July 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: AMADINI, ROBERTO; GABBRIELLI, MAURIZIO; MAURO, JACOPO; Leuschel, Michael; Schrijvers, Tom
• Is Part Of: Theory and practice of logic programming. Volume 14:Issue 4/5(2014)
• Page Start: 509
• Page End: 524
• Publication Date: 2014-07-21
• Subjects: Logic programming -- Periodicals; Artificial intelligence -- Computer programs -- Periodicals; Constraint programming (Computer science) -- Periodicals; 005.115
• DOI: 10.1017/S1471068414000179
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1471-0684

Abstract

<abstract abstract-type="normal"> <title>Abstract</title> <p>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 <monospace>sunny-csp</monospace>, 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 <monospace>sunny-csp</monospace> 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.</p> </abstract>