PACE Solver Description: DAGer - Cutting out Cycles with MaxSAT

Rafael Kiesel, André Schidler

Abstract: We describe the solver DAGer for the Directed Feedback Vertex Set (DFVS) problem, as it was submitted to the exact track of the 2022 PACE Challenge. Our approach first applies a wide range of preprocessing techniques involving both well-known data reductions for DFVS as well as non-trivial adaptations from the vertex cover problem. For the actual solving, we found that using a MaxSAT solver with incremental constraints achieves a good performance.