Lodha, N., Ordyniak, S. orcid.org/0000-0003-1935-651X and Szeider, S. (2019) A SAT approach to branchwidth. ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 20 (3). 15. ISSN 1529-3785
Abstract
Branch decomposition is a prominent method for structurally decomposing a graph, a hypergraph, or a propositional formula in conjunctive normal form. The width of a branch decomposition provides a measure of how well the object is decomposed. For many applications, it is crucial to computing a branch decomposition whose width is as small as possible. We propose an approach based on Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) to finding branch decompositions of small width. The core of our approach is an efficient SAT encoding that determines with a single SAT-call whether a given hypergraph admits a branch decomposition of a certain width. For our encoding, we propose a natural partition-based characterization of branch decompositions. The encoding size imposes a limit on the size of the given hypergraph. To break through this barrier and to scale the SAT approach to larger instances, we develop a new heuristic approach where the SAT encoding is used to locally improve a given candidate decomposition until a fixed-point is reached. This new SAT-based local improvement method scales now to instances with several thousands of vertices and edges.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. This is an author-produced version of a paper subsequently published in ACM Transactions on Computational Logic. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Computer Science (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 02 Jul 2019 14:54 |
Last Modified: | 20 Jan 2020 13:16 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | ACM |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1145/3326159 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:147995 |