3.5 Short Evalution

The following table shows impressively the benefits of combining propagation-based and linear programming solvers for this kind of problem. We used LP_SOLVE 2.0 as LP solver. Note using a different LP solver may produce different results. By combining both constraint models the number of nodes in the search tree could be reduced by two resp. one to orders of magnitudes. This results in a speed-up of one order of magnitude and memory saving by the same amount.

Model

Nodes

Sols

Failures

Depth

runtime

heap

[sec]

[MB]

FD Model

5270

44

5227

18

4.980

10.4

LP Model

490

12

479

26

3.390

3.3

FD+LP Model

52

8

45

12

0.390

0.6

The times were taken on a Pentium Pro 200MHz with 192 MB memory.

The described technique has been used to tackle set partitioning problems. In contrast to [Mül98] all problem could be solve in acceptable time (detailed benchmarks are included as they are available).


Tobias Müller
Version 1.4.0 (20080702)