Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by 2400 2461 days ago
amazing, I tried doing this recently but I guess my modeling was not good enough and it would take hours to find the solution with a couple of dozen variables. Do you have any pointers on how to much these types of problems with a SMT/SAT solver efficiently?
1 comments

The documentation and API quirks of z3 also led me down some performance sinks before I was able to tackle the larger models. Not a Z3/SMT expert, but what worked for me was to model every time tick as the sum of all tasks that could be performed at that instant. Set a constraint on each tick that sets the sum of these tasks to be <= P. Add the book-keeping on the task-job relationships and that was it.

Using the Python bindings, the biggest performance impact I discovered was ensuring that my jobs and tasks were represented as z3.Bool and not z3.Int (requiring a roundabout way to do a summation on z3.Bools). Something like:

  tasks_this_tick = [(z3.Bool(task_id), 1) for task_id in current_tasks]
  model.add(z3.PbLe(tasks_this_tick, max_tasks_per_tick + 1)