MPMMine: Better Benchmarks for Constraint Acquisition

Abstract

Constraint Acquisition (CA) and related research on the validation and enhancement of Mathematical Programming (MP) models using domain knowledge artifacts are currently limited by inadequate benchmarks. The existing benchmarks are loosely organized, provide inconsistent types and formats of artifacts for individual problems, are designed for benchmarking solvers rather than CA algorithms, include narrow classes of problems, or omit crucial details for the reproducibility of experiments and fair comparison of CA methods. We develop a benchmark dataset, a supporting software package, and a benchmarking tool crafted for the consistent, systematic, and comprehensive assessment of CA algorithms, bridging the gap in algorithmic development and experimental infrastructure. This work presents MPMMine, a benchmark suite designed to assess algorithms that discover, validate, and enhance MP models using diverse artifacts. The development of MPMMine is guided by design rules supporting consistency, standardization, completeness, extensibility, openness, and version control. It adopts a uniform structure and relies on open formats. It provides alternative formulations of MP models per problem, tens of parameter instantiations per MP model, and thousands of exemplary solutions and non-solutions in discrete, continuous, and mixed domains, alongside natural-language descriptions to support text-to-model methods. The mpmmine-py Python package provides an application programming interface for accessing the dataset artifacts. The MPMMine Leaderboard is a~tool that systematically evaluates existing CA algorithms using MPMMine under consistent conditions. It leverages open source implementations, runs them in isolated containers adapting input/output to their needs to build an extensive, interactive scoreboard.