There has been substantial recent interest in two new families of search techniques. One family consists of nonsystematic methods such as gsat; the other contains systematic approaches that use a polynomial amount of justification information to prune the search space. This paper introduces a new technique that combines these two approaches. The algorithm allows substantial freedom of movement in the search space but enough information is retained to ensure the systematicity of the resulting analysis. Bounds are given for the size of the justification database and conditions are presented that guarantee that this database will be polynomial in the size of the problem in question. 1 INTRODUCTION The past few years have seen rapid progress in the development of algorithms for solving constraintsatisfaction problems, or csps. Csps arise naturally in subfields of AI from planning to vision, and examples include propositional theorem proving, map coloring and scheduling problems. The probl...

Many problems of practical interest can be solved using tree search methods because carefully tuned successor ordering heuristics guide the search toward regions of the space that are likely to contain solutions. For some problems, the heuristics often lead directly to a solution— but not always. Limited discrepancy search addresses the problem of what to do when the heuristics fail. Our intuition is that a failing heuristic might well have succeeded if it were not for a small number of "wrong turns " along the way. For a binary tree of height d, there are only d ways the heuristic could make a single wrong turn, and only d(d-i)/2 ways it could make two. A small number of wrong turns can be overcome by systematically searching all paths that differ from the heuristic path in at most a small number of decision points, or "discrepancies." Limited discrepancy search is a backtracking algorithm that searches the nodes of the tree in increasing order of such discrepancies. We show formally and experimentally that limited discrepancy search can be expected to outperform existing approaches. 1

The field of metaheuristics for the application to combinatorial optimization problems is a rapidly growing field of research. This is due to the importance of combinatorial optimization problems for the scientific as well as the industrial world. We give a survey of the nowadays most important metaheuristics from a conceptual point of view. We outline the different components and concepts that are used in the different metaheuristics in order to analyze their similarities and differences. Two very important concepts in metaheuristics are intensification and diversification. These are the two forces that largely determine the behaviour of a metaheuristic. They are in some way contrary but also complementary to each other. We introduce a framework, that we call the I&D frame, in order to put different intensification and diversification components into relation with each other. Outlining the advantages and disadvantages of different metaheuristic approaches we conclude by pointing out the importance of hybridization of metaheuristics as well as the integration of metaheuristics and other methods for optimization.

This paper presents a search technique for scheduling problems, called Heuristic-Biased Stochastic Sampling (HBSS). The underlying assumption behind the HBSS approach is that strictly adhering to a search heuristic often does not yield the best solution and, therefore, exploration off the heuristic path can prove fruitful. Within the HBSS approach, the balance between heuristic adherence and exploration can be controlled according to the confidence one has in the heuristic. By varying this balance, encoded as a bias function, the HBSS approach encompasses a family of search algorithms of which greedy search and completely random search are extreme members. We present empirical results from an application of HBSS to the realworld problem of observation scheduling. These results show that with the proper bias function, it can be easy to outperform greedy search. Introducing HBSS This paper presents a search technique, called Heuristic-Biased Stochastic Sampling (HBSS), that was design...

Many search trees are impractically large to explore exhaustively. Recently, techniques like limited discrepancy search have been proposed for improving the chance of finding a goal in a limited amount of search. Depth-bounded discrepancy search offers such a hope. The motivation behind depth-bounded discrepancy search is that branching heuristics are more likely to be wrong at the top of the tree than at the bottom. We therefore combine one of the best features of limited discrepancy search -- the ability to undo early mistakes -- with the completeness of iterative deepening search. We show theoretically and experimentally that this novel combination outperforms existing techniques. 1 Introduction On backtracking, depth-first search explores decisions made against the branching heuristic (or "discrepancies "), starting with decisions made deep in the search tree. However, branching heuristics are more likely to be wrong at the top of the tree than at the bottom. We would like theref...

:- Due to the stubborn nature of the deterministic job-shop scheduling problem many solutions proposed are of hybrid construction cutting across the traditional disciplines. The problem has been investigated from a variety of perspectives resulting in several analytical techniques combining generic as well as problem specific strategies. We seek to assess a subclass of this problem in which the objective is minimising makespan, by providing an overview of the history, the techniques used and the researchers involved. The sense and direction of their work is evaluated by assessing the reported results of their techniques on the available benchmark problems. From these results the current situation and pointers for future work are provided. KEYWORDS:- Scheduling Theory; Job-Shop; Review; Computational Study; 1. INTRODUCTION Current market trends such as consumer demand for variety, shorter product life cycles and competitive pressure to reduce costs have resulted in the need for zero i...

The hybridisation of systematic and stochastic search is an active research area with potential bene ts for real-world combinatorial problems. This paper shows that randomising the backtracking component of a systematic backtracker can improve its scalability to equal that of stochastic local search. The hybrid may be viewed as stochastic local search in a constrained space, cleanly combining local search with constraint programming techniques. The approach is applied to two very dierent problems. Firstly a hybrid of local search and constraint propagation is applied to hard random 3-SAT problems, and is the rst constructive search algorithm to solve very large instances. Secondly a hybrid of local search and branch-and-bound is applied to low-autocorrelation binary sequences (a notoriously dicult communications engineering problem), and is the rst stochastic search algorithm to nd optimal solutions. These results show that the approach is a promising one for both constraint satisfaction and optimisation problems.

Systematic backtracking is used in many constraint solvers and combinatorial optimisation algorithms. It is complete and can be combined with powerful search pruning techniques such as branch-and-bound, constraint propagation and dynamic variable ordering. However, it often scales poorly to large problems. Local search is incomplete, and has the additional drawback that it cannot exploit pruning techniques, making it uncompetitive on some problems. Nevertheless its scalability makes it superior for many large applications. This paper describes a hybrid approach called Incomplete Dynamic Backtracking, a very flexible form of backtracking that sacrifices completeness to achieve the scalability of local search. It is combined with forward checking and dynamic variable ordering, and evaluated on three combinatorial problems: on the n-queens problem it out-performs the best local search algorithms; it finds large optimal Golomb rulers much more quickly than a constraint-based backtracker, and better rulers than a genetic algorithm; and on benchmark graphs it finds larger cliques than almost all other tested algorithms. We argue that this form of backtracking is actually local search in a space of consistent partial assignments, offering a generic way of combining standard pruning techniques with local search.

For many constraint satisfaction problems, there are well known, fast algorithms and functions that solve parts of the problem. Using these methods directly to solve the subproblems significantly speeds up the solving process. Unfortunately, doing this has usually required the solver to be changed, or the correctness criteria to be re-examined. We describe a general mechanism to use procedures with almost any search engine, such that it is easy to add any procedures without changing the engine. Furthermore, the framework is formally defined, which allows us to prove conditions that are sufficient to guarantee systematicity and completeness for search engines using procedures. 1 Introduction For many constraint satisfaction problems there are simple functional relations (e.g. arithmetic equations) and simple subproblems (e.g. linear equations with unknowns) that can be solved quickly, using simple algorithms. Needless to say, taking advantage of such algorithms can significantly decrea...

There are several powerful solvers for satisfiability (SAT), such as wsat, Davis-Putnam, and relsat. However, in practice, the SAT encodings often have so many clauses that we exceed physical memory resources on attempting to solve them. This excessive size often arises because conversion to SAT, from a more natural encoding using quantifications over domains, requires expanding quantifiers. This suggests that we should "lift" successful SAT solvers. That is, adapt the solvers to use quantified clauses instead of ground clauses. However, it was generally believed that such lifted solvers would be impractical: Partially, because of the overhead of handling the predicates and quantifiers, and partially because lifting would not allow essential indexing and caching schemes. Here we show that, to the contrary, it is not only practical to handle quantified clauses directly, but that lifting can give exponential savings. We do this by identifying certain tasks that are central to...