Continuous search in constraint programming

Abstract

This work presents the concept of Continuous Search (CS), whose objective is to allow any user to eventually get their constraint solver achieving a top performance on their problems. Continuous Search comes in two modes: the functioning mode solves the user's problem instances using the current heuristics model; the exploration mode reuses these instances to train and improve the heuristics model through Machine Learning during the computer idle time. Contrasting with previous approaches, Continuous Search thus does not require that the representative instances needed to train a good heuristics model be available beforehand. It achieves lifelong learning, gradually becoming an expert on the user's problem instance distribution. Experimental validation suggests that Continuous Search can design efficient mixed strategies after considering a moderate number of problem instances.