Constraint Integer Programming

This thesis introduces the novel paradigm of constraint integer programming (CIP), which integrates constraint programming (CP) andmixed integer programming (MIP) modeling and solving techniques. It is supplemented by the software SCIP, which is a solver and framework for constraint integer programming that also features SAT solving techniques. SCIP is freely available in source code for academic and non-commercial purposes. Our constraint integer programming approach is a generalization of MIP that allows for the inclusion of arbitrary constraints, as long as they turn into linear constraints on the continuous variables after all integer variables have been fixed. The constraints, may they be linear or more complex, are treated by any combination of CP and MIP techniques: the propagation of the domains by constraint specific algorithms, the generation of a linear relaxation and its solving by LP methods, and the strengthening of the LP by cutting plane separation. The current version of SCIP comes with all of the necessary components to solve mixed integer programs. In the thesis, we cover most of these ingredients and present extensive computational results to compare different variants for the individual building blocks of a MIP solver. We focus on the algorithms and their impact on the overall performance of the solver. In addition to mixed integer programming, the thesis deals with chip design verification, which is an important topic of electronic design automation. Chip manufacturers have to make sure that the logic design of a circuit conforms to the specification of the chip. Otherwise, the chip would show an erroneous behavior that may cause failures in the device where it is employed. An important subproblem of chip design verification is the property checking problem, which is to verify whether a circuit satisfies a specified property. We show how this problem can be modeled as constraint integer program and provide a number of problem-specific algorithms that exploit the structure of the individual constraints and the circuit as a whole. Another set of extensive computational benchmarks compares our CIP approach to the current state-of-the-art SAT methodology and documents the success of our method.