Retail Search Appliance Using SMT Solvers for Rule Processing
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Solution Overview
Problem
The complexity of searching retail offerings due to restricted pricing, business rules, and personalization options, particularly in NP-Complete problem spaces like airline flight search, leads to inefficient and inaccurate results, affecting profitability.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of SMT solvers and hardware-optimized descriptions to translate retail rules and offerings into a domain-specific language, generating computer-executable instructions for efficient processing by a retail appliance, utilizing a combination of software and hardware engines for verification and execution.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If traditional software-based retail search systems are used to handle complex pricing rules and constraints, then the system can process a wide variety of retail offerings, but the computational complexity increases exponentially leading to inefficient and inaccurate search results
Solution Approach 1:
The patent replaces traditional software-based search algorithms with a hardware-based system using FPGAs and logic circuits. The retail search problem is transformed into a satisfiability (SAT) problem that can be efficiently solved by specialized hardware logic circuits, avoiding the exponential computational complexity of software-based NP-Complete problem solving.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent changes the representation parameters of retail offerings and rules by encoding them into boolean logic variables and constraints suitable for SAT solvers. Retail offerings are represented as sets of boolean variables, and pricing rules are translated into logical constraints, enabling efficient hardware-based evaluation.
2Adaptability or versatility
If the retail search system processes increasingly complex rules and constraints, then the system can accommodate more retail offerings, but the time required to solve the problem increases exponentially
Solution Approach 1:
The patent performs preliminary action by pre-compiling retail offerings into hardware logic circuits and pre-configuring the FPGA-based search engine. The system prepares the logical structure in advance, so that during actual search operations, the hardware can evaluate complex rules in parallel without exponential time delays.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent substitutes software-based sequential processing with hardware-based parallel processing. Logic circuits on FPGAs can evaluate multiple constraints simultaneously, reducing computation time from exponential to polynomial or constant time depending on the problem structure.
3Productivity
If specialized hardware circuits are designed to solve specific retail search problems, then the search speed improves, but the device complexity and development cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates a universal hardware-based search engine using FPGAs that can handle multiple types of retail search problems through configurable logic circuits. The same hardware platform can be reconfigured to solve different SAT instances corresponding to various retail offerings and rule sets, avoiding the need for custom specialized hardware for each problem type.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary layer that translates retail search problems into SAT problem formulations. This intermediary translation step allows general-purpose SAT-solving hardware to handle specific retail search problems, reducing the need for highly specialized complex circuits while maintaining high performance.
Data Source
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AI summary
Example implementations relate to processing of retail offerings and retail rules for implementation in a retail appliance. For example, retail rules and retail offerings may be translated into a retail offer domain-specific language (DSL). The translated retail rules and retail offerings may be expressed as constraints according to a satisfiability modulo theory (SMT) language. A hardware-optimized description of the translated retail rules and retail offerings may be generated that satisfy the constraints, and computer-executable instructions may be generated, based on the hardware-optimized description.