Connections and Integration with SAT Solvers: A Survey and a Case Study in Computational Biology∗

Boolean constraints play a fundamental rôle in optimization and constraint satisfaction. The resolution of these constraints has been the subject of intense and successful work during the past decade, and SAT solvers have reached a spectacular maturity. This chapter gives a brief overview of the relevant literature on modern SAT solvers and on the recent efforts to better integrate Boolean reasoning with other constraint satisfaction techniques. As a case study that illustrates the use of SAT and CP we consider an application in computational biology: the task to build gene regulatory networks (GRNs). We report on experiments made on this problem with a combined SAT/CP approach.