Column Generation with Domain-Independent Dynamic Programming
Primary research
#417
- Canonical URL
- http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14317v2
- Topic
- Systems and Efficiency
- First seen
- 2026-07-16 23:33:03
- Last seen
- 2026-07-16 23:33:03
Source raw items (1)
- arXiv2026-07-16 23:32:00Column Generation with Domain-Independent Dynamic Programming
Column generation and branch-and-price (B&P) are leading mathematical optimization methods for large-scale exact optimization, iterating between solving a master problem and a pricing problem. Due to the difficulty of discrete optimization, high-performance column generation often relies on a custom pricing algorithm built specifically to exploit the problem's structure. This bespoke nature of the pricing solver makes column generation a problem-specific method and hinders the use of generic implementations across a wide range of problems. We show that domain-independent dynamic programming (DIDP), a model-based paradigm for dynamic programming, can be used as a generic pricing solver. We develop new modeling features and a solving algorithm for DIDP to achieve better performance in typical pricing problems. We demonstrate that in four problem classes, our implementations of B&P, with pricing by DIDP, empirically outperform an existing automated B&P solver and B&P with pricing by mixed-integer programming or constraint programming.