scholarly journals Influence of Variables Encoding and Symmetry Breaking on the Performance of Optimization Modulo Theories Tools Applied to Cloud Resource Selection

10.29007/zwdh ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madalina Erascu ◽  
Flavia Micota ◽  
Daniela Zaharie

The problem of Cloud resource provisioning for component-based applications is very important. It consists in the allocation of virtual machines (VMs) from various Cloud Providers (CPs), to a set of applications such that the constraints induced by the inter- actions between components and by the components hardware/software requirements are satisfied and the performance objectives are optimized (e.g. costs are minimized). It can be formulated as a constrained optimization problem and tackled by state-of-the-art optimization modulo theories (OMT) tools. The performance of the OMT tools is highly dependent on the way the problem is formalized as this determines the size of the search space. In the case when the number of VMs offers is large, a naive encoding which does not exploit the symmetries of the underlying problem leads to a huge search space making the optimization problem intractable. We overcame this issue by reducing the search space by using: (1) a heuristic which exploits the particularities of the application by detect- ing cliques in the conflict graph of the application components fixing all components of the clique with the largest number of component instances, and (2) a lex-leader method for breaking variable symmetry where the canonical solution fulfills an order based on either the number of components deployed on VMs, or on the VMs price. As the result, the running time of the optimization problem improves considerably and the optimization problem scales up to hundreds of VM offers. We also observed that by combining the heuristic with the lex-leader method we obtained better computational results than by using them separately, suggesting the fact that symmetry breaking constraints have the advantage of interacting well with the search heuristic being used.

Symmetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 895 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fares M’zoughi ◽  
Izaskun Garrido ◽  
Aitor J. Garrido

Global optimization problems are mostly solved using search methods. Therefore, decreasing the search space can increase the efficiency of their solving. A widely exploited technique to reduce the search space is symmetry-breaking, which helps impose constraints on breaking existing symmetries. The present article deals with the airflow control optimization problem in an oscillating-water-column using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). In an effort to ameliorate the efficiency of the PSO search, a symmetry-breaking technique has been implemented. The results of optimization showed that shrinking the search space helped to reduce the search time and ameliorate the efficiency of the PSO algorithm.


Symmetry ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 1300
Author(s):  
Uroš Čibej ◽  
Luka Fürst ◽  
Jurij Mihelič

We introduce a new equivalence on graphs, defined by its symmetry-breaking capability. We first present a framework for various backtracking search algorithms, in which the equivalence is used to prune the search tree. Subsequently, we define the equivalence and an optimization problem with the goal of finding an equivalence partition with the highest pruning potential. We also position the optimization problem into the computational-complexity hierarchy. In particular, we show that the verifier lies between P and NP -complete problems. Striving for a practical usability of the approach, we devise a heuristic method for general graphs and optimal algorithms for trees and cycles.


Author(s):  
Jiaoyang Li ◽  
Daniel Harabor ◽  
Peter J. Stuckey ◽  
Hang Ma ◽  
Sven Koenig

We describe a new way of reasoning about symmetric collisions for Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) on 4-neighbor grids. We also introduce a symmetry-breaking constraint to resolve these conflicts. This specialized technique allows us to identify and eliminate, in a single step, all permutations of two currently assigned but incompatible paths. Each such permutation has exactly the same cost as a current path, and each one results in a new collision between the same two agents. We show that the addition of symmetry-breaking techniques can lead to an exponential reduction in the size of the search space of CBS, a popular framework for MAPF, and report significant improvements in both runtime and success rate versus CBSH and EPEA* – two recent and state-of-the-art MAPF algorithms.


Constraints ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Koehler ◽  
Josef Bürgler ◽  
Urs Fontana ◽  
Etienne Fux ◽  
Florian Herzog ◽  
...  

AbstractCable trees are used in industrial products to transmit energy and information between different product parts. To this date, they are mostly assembled by humans and only few automated manufacturing solutions exist using complex robotic machines. For these machines, the wiring plan has to be translated into a wiring sequence of cable plugging operations to be followed by the machine. In this paper, we study and formalize the problem of deriving the optimal wiring sequence for a given layout of a cable tree. We summarize our investigations to model this cable tree wiring problem (CTW). as a traveling salesman problem with atomic, soft atomic, and disjunctive precedence constraints as well as tour-dependent edge costs such that it can be solved by state-of-the-art constraint programming (CP), Optimization Modulo Theories (OMT), and mixed-integer programming (MIP). solvers. It is further shown, how the CTW problem can be viewed as a soft version of the coupled tasks scheduling problem. We discuss various modeling variants for the problem, prove its NP-hardness, and empirically compare CP, OMT, and MIP solvers on a benchmark set of 278 instances. The complete benchmark set with all models and instance data is available on github and was included in the MiniZinc challenge 2020.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1093
Author(s):  
Jeonghyun Lee ◽  
Sangkyun Lee

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved tremendous success in solving complex classification problems. Motivated by this success, there have been proposed various compression methods for downsizing the CNNs to deploy them on resource-constrained embedded systems. However, a new type of vulnerability of compressed CNNs known as the adversarial examples has been discovered recently, which is critical for security-sensitive systems because the adversarial examples can cause malfunction of CNNs and can be crafted easily in many cases. In this paper, we proposed a compression framework to produce compressed CNNs robust against such adversarial examples. To achieve the goal, our framework uses both pruning and knowledge distillation with adversarial training. We formulate our framework as an optimization problem and provide a solution algorithm based on the proximal gradient method, which is more memory-efficient than the popular ADMM-based compression approaches. In experiments, we show that our framework can improve the trade-off between adversarial robustness and compression rate compared to the existing state-of-the-art adversarial pruning approach.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tao Chen ◽  
Wei Gou ◽  
Dizhou Xie ◽  
Teng Xiao ◽  
Wei Yi ◽  
...  

AbstractWe experimentally study quantum Zeno effects in a parity-time (PT) symmetric cold atom gas periodically coupled to a reservoir. Based on the state-of-the-art control of inter-site couplings of atoms in a momentum lattice, we implement a synthetic two-level system with passive PT symmetry over two lattice sites, where an effective dissipation is introduced through repeated couplings to the rest of the lattice. Quantum Zeno (anti-Zeno) effects manifest in our experiment as the overall dissipation of the two-level system becoming suppressed (enhanced) with increasing coupling intensity or frequency. We demonstrate that quantum Zeno regimes exist in the broken PT symmetry phase, and are bounded by exceptional points separating the PT symmetric and PT broken phases, as well as by a discrete set of critical coupling frequencies. Our experiment establishes the connection between PT-symmetry-breaking transitions and quantum Zeno effects, and is extendable to higher dimensions or to interacting regimes, thanks to the flexible control with atoms in a momentum lattice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (11) ◽  
pp. 2445-2458
Author(s):  
Valerio Cetorelli ◽  
Paolo Atzeni ◽  
Valter Crescenzi ◽  
Franco Milicchio

We introduce landmark grammars , a new family of context-free grammars aimed at describing the HTML source code of pages published by large and templated websites and therefore at effectively tackling Web data extraction problems. Indeed, they address the inherent ambiguity of HTML, one of the main challenges of Web data extraction, which, despite over twenty years of research, has been largely neglected by the approaches presented in literature. We then formalize the Smallest Extraction Problem (SEP), an optimization problem for finding the grammar of a family that best describes a set of pages and contextually extract their data. Finally, we present an unsupervised learning algorithm to induce a landmark grammar from a set of pages sharing a common HTML template, and we present an automatic Web data extraction system. The experiments on consolidated benchmarks show that the approach can substantially contribute to improve the state-of-the-art.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 98-116
Author(s):  
Noureddine Boukhari ◽  
Fatima Debbat ◽  
Nicolas Monmarché ◽  
Mohamed Slimane

Evolution strategies (ES) are a family of strong stochastic methods for global optimization and have proved their capability in avoiding local optima more than other optimization methods. Many researchers have investigated different versions of the original evolution strategy with good results in a variety of optimization problems. However, the convergence rate of the algorithm to the global optimum stays asymptotic. In order to accelerate the convergence rate, a hybrid approach is proposed using the nonlinear simplex method (Nelder-Mead) and an adaptive scheme to control the local search application, and the authors demonstrate that such combination yields significantly better convergence. The new proposed method has been tested on 15 complex benchmark functions and applied to the bi-objective portfolio optimization problem and compared with other state-of-the-art techniques. Experimental results show that the performance is improved by this hybridization in terms of solution eminence and strong convergence.


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