On Optimizing a Generic Function in SAT

The goal of this study is to improve the scalability of today's SAT-based solutions for optimization problems and to pave the way towards extending the range of optimization problems solvable with SAT in practice. Let OptSAT be the problem of optimizing a generic Pseudo-Boolean function, given a satisfiable propositional formula F. We introduce an incremental and anytime incomplete algorithm for solving OptSAT, called Polosat. We show that integrating Polosat into a state-of-the-art open-source anytime MaxSAT solver significantly improves the solver's performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that Polosat substantially improves the solution quality of an industrial placement tool, where placement is a sub-stage of the physical design stage of chip design.