Hi Dirk,

 

Yes, I see your motivation but the Gecode engines cannot do that. Have you ever 
had a look at the part in MPG about search? Building a BAB engine with this 
additional feature might be not that hard…

 

Good luck

Christian

 

--

Christian Schulte, www.gecode.org/~schulte

Professor of Computer Science, KTH,  <mailto:cschu...@kth.se> cschu...@kth.se

Expert Researcher, RISE SICS,  <mailto:christian.schu...@ri.se> 
christian.schu...@ri.se

 

From: Dirk Obermann [mailto:dirk.oberman...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2017 22:28
To: cschu...@kth.se
Cc: users@gecode.org
Subject: Re: [gecode-users] Adding constraints to model in <RBS>: is there any 
example code?

 

Thanks, Christian.

 

You were, of course, correct. BAB does the job and my code is now much more 
elegant than before. It also works well to combine with RBS.  

 

However, my earlier code was sometimes faster. The reason is that I could take 
"large steps", adding constraints in chunks until the search failed. I  could 
then go back to the last feasible model and add constraints one by one instead 
of in chunks.

Is something similar possible in the gecode search engines? What I would like 
do is  the following: I run BAB until fail, and then "reset the state of the 
engine" to where it was when it produced the last feasible solution ("before my 
last call to the constrain function", so to speak). I would then re-run the 
search from there (with another behavior of the constrain function). 

Thanks,

Dirk

 

On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 1:49 PM, Christian Schulte <cschu...@kth.se> wrote:

Hi,

 

First, I am not so sure that your idea works in principle: you say that the 
problem is that you spend a lot of time to find a first feasible solution, 
especially after adding additional constraints. However, that would not change 
with restarts: after all, you would restart the search and would have to do the 
same search in order to find the first feasible solution. The only benefit I 
could see is adding no-goods from restarts.

 

Anyway, what you want to do (I guess) is that you accumulate additional 
constraints which each restart. This you can only do by adding constraints to 
the master (remember, the slave will always be initialized fresh from the 
master for each restart). LNS is different as you want try different 
constraints each time you restart, hence you have to do it on the slave.

 

Hence, you will have to reimplement the master function, there you just add the 
additional constraints.

 

Have you thought about using BAB? There, each time you find a solution you can 
add new constraints based on that solution _without_ restarting search. Sounds 
more like it to me.

 

Cheers

Christian

 

--

Christian Schulte, www.gecode.org/~schulte

Professor of Computer Science, KTH, cschu...@kth.se

Expert Researcher, RISE SICS, christian.schu...@ri.se

 

From: users-boun...@gecode.org [mailto:users-boun...@gecode.org] On Behalf Of 
Dirk Obermann
Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2017 13:34
To: users@gecode.org
Subject: [gecode-users] Adding constraints to model in <RBS>: is there any 
example code?

 

Hello - 

 

I am trying to do program up a search engine that performs sequential 
refinement by adding more and more constraints to a model. In the first run, I 
am happy with a solution at all, but then I want to add increasingly complex 
constraints until there is no more solution (or the search engine times out).

 

Now, I first run a model with a single constraint. If DFS can find a solution, 
then I run a completely new model with two constraints and from scratch. If 
this model is feasible, then I run the model with three constraints, etc.

 

In principle, this solution works, but it is a very inefficient: a lot of time 
is spent generating the first feasible solution when restarting the search 
(especially as the problem becomes more constrained). 

 

It seems to me that this should be doable with RBS or a variation of the LDS 
engine, as described in the MPG. But there are very few examples to follow (the 
closest I found was this question posted on stack overflow  
<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34182681/how-to-change-the-variable-value-ordering-in-gecodes-restart-based-search>
 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34182681/how-to-change-the-variable-value-ordering-in-gecodes-restart-based-search
 but unfortunately it does not contain any answer). I simply cannot understand 
how to do it right. In particular, where do I post additional constraint on the 
model (in the master space, the slave space or elsewhere)? 

 

Any leads on how to do it, or links to code that adds constraints or changes 
branching order in RBS would be appreciated!

 

Cheers,

 

Dirk

 

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