Thapper and Živný [STOC'13] recently classified the complexity of VCSP for all finite-valued constraint languages. However, the complexity of VCSPs for constraint languages that are not finite-valued remains poorly understood. In this paper we study the complexity of two such VCSPs, namely Min-Cost-Hom and Min-Sol. We obtain a full classification for the complexity of Min-Sol on domains that contain at most three elements and for the complexity of conservative Min-Cost-Hom on arbitrary finite domains. Our results answer a question raised by Takhanov [STACS'10, COCOON'10].

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Pre-runtime scheduling of avionic systems is used to ensure that the systems provide the desired functionality at the correct time. This paper considers scheduling of an integrated modular avionic system which from a more general perspective can be seen as a multiprocessor scheduling problem that includes a communication network. The addressed system is practically relevant and the computational evaluations are made on large-scale instances developed together with the industrial partner Saab. A subset of the instances is made publicly available. Our contribution is a matheuristic for solving these large-scale instances and it is obtained by improving the model formulations used in a previously suggested constraint generation procedure and by including an adaptive large neighbourhood search to extend it into a matheuristic. Characteristics of our adaptive large neighbourhood search are that it is made over both discrete and continuous variables and that it needs to balance the search for feasibility and profitable objective value. The repair operation is to apply a mixed-integer programming solver on a model where most of the constraints are treated as soft and a violation of them is instead penalised in the objective function. The largest solved instance, with respect to the number of tasks, has 54,731 tasks and 2530 communication messages.

Valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSPs) are discrete optimisation problems with a (Q ∪ {∞})-valued objective function given as a sum of fixed-arity functions. In Boolean surjective VCSPs, variables take on labels from D = {0, 1} and an optimal assignment is required to use both labels from D. Examples include the classical global Min-Cut problem in graphs and the Minimum Distance problem studied in coding theory.We establish a dichotomy theorem and thus give a complete complexity classification of Boolean surjective VCSPs with respect to exact solvability. Our work generalises the dichotomy for {0, ∞}-valued constraint languages (corresponding to surjective decision CSPs) obtained by Creignou and Hébrard. For the maximisation problem of Q ≥0 -valued surjective VCSPs, we also establish a dichotomy theorem with respect to approximability.Unlike in the case of Boolean surjective (decision) CSPs, there appears a novel tractable class of languages that is trivial in the non-surjective setting. This newly discovered tractable class has an interesting mathematical structure related to downsets and upsets. Our main contribution is identifying this class and proving that it lies on the borderline of tractability. A crucial part of our proof is a polynomial-time algorithm for enumerating all near-optimal solutions to a generalised Min-Cut problem, which might be of independent interest. * Extended abstracts of parts of this work appeared in

Abstract. Obtaining lower bounds for NP-hard problems has for a long time been an active area of research. Recent algebraic techniques introduced by Jonsson et al. (SODA 2013) show that the time complexity of the parameterized SAT(·) problem correlates to the lattice of strong partial clones. With this ordering they isolated a relation R such that SAT(R) can be solved at least as fast as any other NP-hard SAT(·) problem. In this paper we extend this method and show that such languages also exist for the max ones problem (MAX-ONES(Γ )) and the Boolean valued constraint satisfaction problem over finite-valued constraint languages (VCSP(∆ )). With the help of these languages we relate MAX-ONES and VCSP to the exponential time hypothesis in several different ways.