Solving Global Unconstrained Optimization Problems by Symmetry-Breaking

Global optimization has many real-world applications. Most methods for solving it are based on search,so decreasing its search space can increase the efficiency for their solving. Symmetry-breaking is an important technique for decreasing search space and it has been widely used in SAT,CSP and so on. In this paper, we try to decrease the search space of an unconstrained optimization problem by symmetry breaking.We present a method for extracting symmetries of an unconstrained optimization problem, and a method for constructing constraints to break those symmetries. The experimental results show that our methods are effective and efficient and symmetry-breaking can indeed increase the efficiency of global optimization problems solving.