Inference Rules in Local Search for Max-SAT

In the last years, many advances were accomplished in the exact solving of the Max-SAT problem, especially by the definition of new inference rules and a better estimation of lower bounds in branch and bound based methods. However, and oppositely to the SAT problem, fewer works exist on approximate methods for Max-SAT, mainly local search ones which have shown their potency for SAT. In this paper, we illustrate that including inference rules in a classical local search solver for SAT improves its performances when solving the Max-SAT problem. The obtained results confirm the efficiency of our approach.