Automatic Construction of Parallel Portfolios via Explicit Instance
  Grouping
  Simultaneously utilizing several complementary solvers is a simple yet
effective strategy for solving computationally hard problems. However, manually
building such solver portfolios typically requires considerable domain
knowledge and plenty of human effort. As an alternative, automatic construction
of parallel portfolios (ACPP) aims at automatically building effective parallel
portfolios based on a given problem instance set and a given rich design space.
One promising way to solve the ACPP problem is to explicitly group the
instances into different subsets and promote a component solver to handle each
of them.This paper investigates solving ACPP from this perspective, and
especially studies how to obtain a good instance grouping.The experimental
results showed that the parallel portfolios constructed by the proposed method
could achieve consistently superior performances to the ones constructed by the
state-of-the-art ACPP methods,and could even rival sophisticated hand-designed
parallel solvers.
