New local search methods for partial MaxSAT.

Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) is the optimization version of the Satisfiability (SAT) problem. Partial Maximum Satisfiability (PMS) is a generalization of MaxSAT which involves hard and soft clauses and has important real world applications. Local search is a popular approach to solving SAT and MaxSAT and has witnessed great success in these two problems. However, unfortunately, local search algorithms for PMS do not benefit much from local search techniques for SAT and MaxSAT, mainly due to the fact that it contains both hard and soft clauses. This feature makes it more challenging to design efficient local search algorithms for PMS, which is likely the reason of the stagnation of this direction in more than one decade.