General purpose methods for

combinational optimization
Prabhavathi P
Assoc. Professor
Department of ECE,
BNMIT
Optimization
• Many real-world problems involve maximizing or minimizing a
value:
• How can a car manufacturer get the most parts out of a piece of sheet
metal?
• How can a moving company fit the most furniture into a truck of a certain
size?
• How can the phone company route calls to get the best use of its lines and
connections?
• How can a university schedule its classes to make the best use of classrooms
without conflicts?
Optimization: Ingredients
• Objective function
• Variables
• Constraints

Find values of the variables

that minimize or maximize the objective function
while satisfying the constraints
Different Kinds of Optimization

Figure from: Optimization Technology Center

http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/otc/Guide/OptWeb/
VLSI Design automation as a problem
• Most of the VLSI design automation is considered to be combinatorial
optimization problem
• They are often considered to be intractable
• 3 possibilities for cases that are intractable
• Exhaustive search : Backtracking & Branch and Bound
• Approximate solutions : Problem specific solutions can be found
• Heuristics : Tabu search, local search, Simulated annealing and Genetic
algorithms.
Dynamic Planning

• Calculates all of the possible solution options, then chooses the best
one.

• Implemented recursively.

• Produces an optimal solution.

• Spends more time.