Exploiting semidefinite relaxations in constraint programming [An article from: Computers and Operations Research]

This digital document is a journal article from Computers and Operations Research, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Constraint programming uses enumeration and search tree pruning to solve combinatorial optimization problems. In order to speed up this solution process, we investigate the use of semidefinite relaxations within constraint programming. In principle, we use the solution of a semidefinite relaxation to guide the traversal of the search tree, using a limited discrepancy search strategy. Furthermore, a semidefinite relaxation produces a bound for the solution value, which is used to prune parts of the search tree. Experimental results on stable set and maximum clique problem instances show that constraint programming can indeed greatly benefit from semidefinite relaxations.