The Exponentiated Subgradient Algorithm for Heuristic Boolean Programming

Boolean linear programs (BLPs) are ubiquitous in AI. Satisfiability testing, planning with resource constraints, and winner determination in combinatorial auctions are all examples of this type of problem. Although increasingly well-informed by work in OR, current AI research has tended to focus on specialized algorithms for each type of BLP task and has only loosely patterned new algorithms on effective methods from other tasks. In this paper we introduce a single general-purpose local search procedure that can be simultaneously applied to the entire range of BLP problems, without modification. Although one might suspect that a general-purpose algorithm might not perform as well as specialized algorithms, we find that this is not the case here. Our experiments show that our generic algorithm simultaneously achieves performance comparable with the state of the art in satisfiability search and winner determination in combinatorial auctions— two very different BLP problems. Our algorithm is simple, and combines an old idea from OR with recent ideas from AI.