Algorithms for the workflow satisfiability problem engineered for counting constraints

Cohen, D., Crampton, J., Gagarin, A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9749-9706, Gutin, G. and Jones, M. 2016. Algorithms for the workflow satisfiability problem engineered for counting constraints. Journal of Combinatorial Optimization 32 , pp. 3-24. 10.1007/s10878-015-9877-7

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Abstract

The workflow satisfiability problem (WSP) asks whether there exists an assignment of authorized users to the steps in a workflow specification that satisfies the constraints in the specification. The problem is NP-hard in general, but several subclasses of the problem are known to be fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) when parameterized by the number of steps in the specification. In this paper, we consider the WSP with user-independent counting constraints, a large class of constraints for which the WSP is known to be FPT. We describe an efficient implementation of an FPT algorithm for solving this subclass of the WSP and an experimental evaluation of this algorithm. The algorithm iteratively generates all equivalence classes of possible partial solutions until, whenever possible, it finds a complete solution to the problem. We also provide a reduction from a WSP instance to a pseudo-Boolean (PB) SAT instance. We apply this reduction to the instances used in our experiments and solve the resulting PB SAT problems using SAT4J, a PB SAT solver. We compare the performance of our algorithm with that of SAT4J and discuss which of the two approaches would be more effective in practice.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Mathematics
Additional Information:	PDF uploaded in accordance with publisher's policies at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/1382-6905/ (accessed 29.7.16).
Publisher:	Springer Verlag (Germany)
ISSN:	1382-6905
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	28 July 2016
Last Modified:	17 Nov 2023 10:42
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/93397

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