Max-SAT formalisms with hard and soft constraints

Abstract

The study of Max-SAT formalisms and the development of fast Max-SAT solvers have become very active research topics in the last few years. This PhD dissertation focus on the design, implementation and evaluation of solving techniques for two Max-SAT formalisms that incorporate the notion of partiality. The first one, called Block-SAT, is a new formalism that deals with blocks of clauses instead of individual clauses. The second one is Partial Max-SAT, which has become a standard in the community. For each formalism, we compare our solvers with state-of-the-art solvers using an exhaustive test suite. The empirical results provide evidence that the proposed solving techniques are competitive and often produce important speed-ups.