Core-guided method for constraint-based multi-objective combinatorial optimization

Multi-Objective Combinatorial Optimization(MOCO), which consists of several conflicting objectives to be optimized, finds an ever-increasing number of uses in many real-world applications. In past years, the research of MOCO mainly focuses on evolutionary algorithms. Recently, constraint-based methods come into the view and have been proved to be effective on MOCO problems. This paper builds on the previous works of constraint-based algorithm MCSEnumPD(AAAI-18) using path diversification method. Due to the inadequacy that the original method fails to prune the redundant search space effectively, this paper proposes the definition of infeasible path and develops a novel algorithm that exploits the properties of unsatisfiable cores, referred as CgPDMCS. The approach extends MCSEnumPD algorithm with a core-guided path diversification method, which avoids solving infeasible paths representing the supersets of the unsatisfiable cores. Experimental results show that the novel approach provides further performance gains over the previous constraint-based algorithms, especially for the instances tightly constrained.