PBFVMC: A New Pseudo-Boolean Formulation to Virtual-Machine Consolidation

Over the course of the last decade, there have been several improvements in the performance of Boolean Satisfiability (SAT), Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and Pseudo-Boolean Optimization (PBO) solvers. These improvements have encouraged the applications of SAT, ILP and PBO techniques in modeling complex engineering problems. One such problem is the Virtual Machine Consolidation. The Virtual Machine Consolidation problem consists in placing a set of virtual machines in a set of hardware in a way to increase workload on hardware where they can operate more energy-efficient. This paper proposes an improved PBO formulation of the Virtual Machine Consolidation problem, PBFVMC. The improved formulation and enhancements are built on top of a previous work and a new set of constraints is created and rationalized to work more friendly with current PBO solvers. It is observed that this new formulation goes a step ahead and more problems can now be solved.