MaxSolver: An efficient exact algorithm for (weighted) maximum satisfiability Original Research Article

Maximum Boolean satisfiability (max-SAT) is the optimization counterpart of Boolean satisfiability (SAT), in which a variable assignment is sought to satisfy the maximum number of clauses in a Boolean formula. A branch and bound algorithm based on the Davis–Putnam–Logemann–Loveland procedure (DPLL) is one of the most competitive exact algorithms for solving max-SAT. In this paper, we propose and investigate a number of strategies for max-SAT. The first strategy is a set of unit propagation or unit resolution rules for max-SAT. We summarize three existing unit propagation rules and propose a new one based on a nonlinear programming formulation of max-SAT. The second strategy is an effective lower bound based on linear programming (LP). We show that the LP lower bound can be made effective as the number of clauses increases. The third strategy consists of a binary-clause first rule and a dynamic-weighting variable ordering rule, which are motivated by a thorough analysis of two existing well-known variable orderings. Based on the analysis of these strategies, we develop an exact solver for both max-SAT and weighted max-SAT. Our experimental results on random problem instances and many instances from the max-SAT libraries show that our new solver outperforms most of the existing exact max-SAT solvers, with orders of magnitude of improvement in many cases.