Automatic generation of dominance breaking nogoods for a class of constraint optimization problems

Constraint Optimization Problems (COPs) ask for an assignment of values to variables in order to optimize an objective subject to constraints that restrict the value combinations in the assignment. They are usually solved by the classical Branch and Bound (B&B) search algorithm. Dominance breaking is an important technique in B&B to prune assignments that are subordinate to others concerning the objective value and/or the satisfiability of constraints. In practice, the addition of constraints for dominance breaking can drastically speed up the B&B search for solving many COPs. However, identification of suboptimal assignments in COPs and derivation of useful constraints for dominance breaking are usually problem-specific and require sophisticated human insights on the problem structure.