Compressing branch-and-bound trees

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Munoz, Gonzalo; Paat, Joseph; Xavier, Alinson S.
• 署名单位: Universidad de O'Higgins; University of British Columbia; United States Department of Energy (DOE); Argonne National Laboratory
• 刊物名称: MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-5610
• DOI: 10.1007/s10107-024-02080-5
• 发表日期: 2025
• 页码: 669-694
• 关键词: integer; disjunctions

摘要

A branch-and-bound (BB) tree certifies a dual bound on the value of an integer program. In this work, we introduce the tree compression problem (TCP): Given a BB treeTthat certifies a dual bound, can we obtain a smaller tree with the same (or stronger) bound by either (1) applying a different disjunction at some node inTor (2) removing leaves fromT? We believe such post-hoc analysis of BB trees may assist in identifying helpful general disjunctions in BB algorithms. We initiate our study by considering computational complexity and limitations of TCP. We then conduct experiments to evaluate the compressibility of realistic branch-and-bound trees generated by commonly-used branching strategies, using both an exact and a heuristic compression algorithm.