Boosting a Complete Technique to Find MSS and MUS thanks to a Local Search Oracle

Éric Grégoire, Bertrand Mazure, Cédric Piette

In this paper, a new complete technique to compute Maximal Satisfiable Subsets (MSS) and Minimally Unsatisfiable Subformulas (MUS) of sets of Boolean clauses is introduced. The approach improves the currently most efficient complete technique in several ways. It makes use of the powerful concept of critical clause and of a computationally inexpensive local search oracle to boost an exhaustive algorithm proposed by Liffiton and Sakallah. These features can allow exponential efficiency gains to be obtained. Accordingly, experimental studies show that this new approach outperforms the best current existing exhaustive ones.

URL: http://www.cril.fr/~piette/IJCAI07_HYCAM.pdf