Automatic dominance breaking for a class of Constraint Optimization Problems

Exploiting dominance relations in many Constraint Optimization Problems can drastically speed up the solving process in practice. Identification and utilization of dominance relations, however, usually require human expertise. We present a theoretical framework for a useful class of constraint optimization problems to detect dominance automatically and formulate the generation of the associated dominance breaking nogoods as constraint satisfaction. By controlling the length and quantity of the nogoods, our method can generate dominance breaking nogoods of varying strengths. Experimentation confirms runtime improvements of up to three orders of magnitude against manual methods.