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Several versions of the Devour Digest Tidy-up Heuristic for Unconstrained Binary Quadratic Problems

Saïd Hanafi, Ahmed Rebaï, Michel Vasquez

Published Jul 25, 2011• 0 citations

Abstract

The unconstrained binary quadratic minimization problem is known to be NP hard and due to its computational challenge and application capability, it becomes more and more considered and involved by the recent research studies, including both exact and heuristic solution approaches. Our work is in line with what was suggested by Glover, Alidaee, Rego and Kochenberger (2002) who proposed one pass heuristics as alternatives to the well-known Devour Digest Tidy-up procedure (DDT) of Boros, Hammer and Sun (1989). The "devour" step sets a term of the current representation to 0 or 1, and the "tidy-up" step substitutes the logical consequences derived from the "digest" step into the current quadratic function. We propose several versions of the DDT constructive heuristic based on the alternative representation of the quadratic function. We also present an efficient implementation of local search using one-flip and two-flip moves that simultaneously change the values of one or two binary variables. Computational experiments performed on instances up to 7000 variables show the efficiency of our implementation in terms of quality improvement and CPU use enhancement.

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The unconstrained binary quadratic minimization problem is known to be NP hard and due to its computational challenge and application capability, it becomes more and more considered and involved by the recent research studies, including both exact and heuristic solution approaches. Our work is in line with what was suggested by Glover, Alidaee, Rego and Kochenberger (2002) who proposed one pass heuristics as alternatives to the well-known Devour Digest Tidy-up procedure (DDT) of Boros, Hammer and Sun (1989). The "devour" step sets a term of the current representation to 0 or 1, and the "tidy-up" step substitutes the logical consequences derived from the "digest" step into the current quadratic function. We propose several versions of the DDT constructive heuristic based on the alternative representation of the quadratic function. We also present an efficient implementation of local search using one-flip and two-flip moves that simultaneously change the values of one or two binary variables. Computational experiments performed on instances up to 7000 variables show the efficiency of our implementation in terms of quality improvement and CPU use enhancement.

We provide a method for efficiently evaluating two-flip moves that simultaneously change the values of two 0-1 variables in search methods for binary unconstrained quadratic optimisation problems (UQP). We extend a framework recently proposed by the authors for creating efficient evaluations of one-flip moves to yield a method requiring significantly less computation time than a direct sequential application of one-flips. A tabu search algorithm that combines one-flip and two-flip moves, in a study currently in process, has made use of this extension to produce very competitive results on some UQP benchmark instances.

In this paper we consider the unconstrained binary quadratic programming problem. This is the problem of maximising a quadratic objective by suitable choice of binary (zero-one) variables. We present two heuristic algorithms based upon tabu search and simulated annealing for this problem. Computational results are presented for a number of publically available data sets involving up to 2500 variables. An interesting feature of our results is that whilst for most problems tabu search dominates simulated annealing for the very largest problems we consider the converse is true. This paper typifies a "multiple solution technique, single paper" approach, i.e. an approach that within the same paper presents results for a number of different heuristics applied to the same problem. Issues relating to algorithmic design for such papers are discussed. Keywords: unconstrained binary (zero-one) quadratic programming

Abstract: We provide a method for efficiently evaluating moves that complement values of 0–1 variables in search methods for binary unconstrained quadratic optimisation problems. Our method exploits a compact matrix representation and offers further improvements in speed by exploiting sparse matrices that arise in large-scale applications. The resulting approach, which works with integer or real data, can be applied to improve the efficiency of a variety of different search processes, especially in the case of commonly encountered applications that involve large and sparse matrices. It also enables larger problems to be solved than could previously be handled within a given amount of available memory. Our evaluation method has been embedded in a tabu search algorithm in a sequel to this paper, yielding a method that efficiently matches or improves currently best-known results for instances from widely used benchmark sets having up to 7,000 variables.

The class of problems known as quadratic zero-one (binary) unconstrained optimisation has provided access to a vast array of combinatorial optimisation problems, allowing them to be expressed within the setting of a single unifying model. A gap exists, however, in addressing polynomial problems of degree greater than 2. To bridge this gap, we provide methods for efficiently executing core search processes for the general polynomial unconstrained binary (PUB) optimisation problem. A variety of search algorithms for quadratic optimisation can take advantage of our methods to be transformed directly into algorithms for problems where the objective functions involve arbitrary polynomials. Part 1 of this paper (Glover et al., 2011) provided fundamental results for carrying out the transformations and described coding and decoding procedures relevant for efficiently handling sparse problems, where many coefficients are 0, as typically arise in practical applications. In the present part 2 paper, we provide special algorithms and data structures for taking advantage of the basic results of part 1. We also disclose how our designs can be used to enhance existing quadratic optimisation algorithms.

This paper presents a perturbation based search method to solve the unconstrained binary quadratic programming problem. The proposed algorithm was tested with some of the standard test problems and the results are reported for 10 instances of 50, 100, 250, & 500 variable problems. A comparison of the performance of the proposed algorithm with other heuristics and optimization software is made. Based on the results, it was found that the proposed algorithm is computationally inexpensive and the solutions obtained match the best known solutions for smaller sized problems. For larger instances, the algorithm is capable of finding a solution within 0.11% of the best known solution. Apart from being used as a stand-alone method, this algorithm could also be incorporated with other heuristics to find better solutions.