The Partner Units Configuration Problem: Completing the Picture

TL;DR

This paper clarifies the computational complexity of the Partner Units Problem (PUP), introduces a highly effective heuristic algorithm called QuickPup, and demonstrates its industrial applicability and superior performance over existing methods.

Contribution

It provides the missing complexity results for PUP and presents QuickPup, a heuristic solver that outperforms current approaches and is used in real-world industrial settings.

Findings

QuickPup outperforms state-of-the-art solvers

Provides complete complexity classification of PUP

Demonstrates industrial applicability of the heuristic

Abstract

The partner units problem (PUP) is an acknowledged hard benchmark problem for the Logic Programming community with various industrial application fields like surveillance, electrical engineering, computer networks or railway safety systems. However, computational complexity remained widely unclear so far. In this paper we provide all missing complexity results making the PUP better exploitable for benchmark testing. Furthermore, we present QuickPup, a heuristic search algorithm for PUP instances which outperforms all state-of-the-art solving approaches and which is already in use in real world industrial configuration environments.