MIP-DD: A Delta Debugger for Mixed Integer Programming Solvers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Hoen, Alexander, Kamp, Dominik, Gleixner, Ambros
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Hoen, Alexander
Kamp, Dominik
Gleixner, Ambros
author_facet Hoen, Alexander
Kamp, Dominik
Gleixner, Ambros
contents The recent performance improvements in mixed-integer programming (MIP) have been accompanied by a significantly increased complexity of the codes of MIP solvers, which poses challenges in fixing implementation errors. In this paper, we introduce MIP-DD, a solver-independent tool, which to the best of our knowledge is the first open-source delta debugger for MIP. Delta debugging is a hypothesis-trial-result approach to isolate the cause of a solver failure. MIP-DD simplifies MIP instances while maintaining the undesired behavior. Preliminary versions already supported and motivated fixes for many bugs in the SCIP releases 8.0.1 to 8.1.1. In these versions, MIP-DD successfully contributed to 24 out of all 51 documented MIP-related bugfixes even for some long-known issues. In selected case studies we highlight that instances triggering fundamental bugs in SCIP can typically be reduced to a few variables and constraints in less than an hour. This makes it significantly easier to manually trace and check the solution process on the resulting simplified instances. A promising future application of MIP-DD is the analysis of performance bottlenecks, which could very well benefit from simple adversarial instances.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_19770
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
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spellingShingle MIP-DD: A Delta Debugger for Mixed Integer Programming Solvers
Hoen, Alexander
Kamp, Dominik
Gleixner, Ambros
Optimization and Control
The recent performance improvements in mixed-integer programming (MIP) have been accompanied by a significantly increased complexity of the codes of MIP solvers, which poses challenges in fixing implementation errors. In this paper, we introduce MIP-DD, a solver-independent tool, which to the best of our knowledge is the first open-source delta debugger for MIP. Delta debugging is a hypothesis-trial-result approach to isolate the cause of a solver failure. MIP-DD simplifies MIP instances while maintaining the undesired behavior. Preliminary versions already supported and motivated fixes for many bugs in the SCIP releases 8.0.1 to 8.1.1. In these versions, MIP-DD successfully contributed to 24 out of all 51 documented MIP-related bugfixes even for some long-known issues. In selected case studies we highlight that instances triggering fundamental bugs in SCIP can typically be reduced to a few variables and constraints in less than an hour. This makes it significantly easier to manually trace and check the solution process on the resulting simplified instances. A promising future application of MIP-DD is the analysis of performance bottlenecks, which could very well benefit from simple adversarial instances.
title MIP-DD: A Delta Debugger for Mixed Integer Programming Solvers
topic Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19770