alt Hacker NewsYou may have tried this already but often times systems require things to be sticky (ex: to increase caching efficiency) and that usually helps solving large problems since most solvers accept "hints" or "warm starts". CP-SAT does a great job accepting hints and cuts down the search time significantly if the hint is good.
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Several tools similar also can take in previous starts that are partially correct and use them to get closer. For my work, I am finding the local-mip package great for finding primal solutions better than CP-SAT, and then using HiGHS for my branch & bounder a great combination and feeding the results from local-mip to HiGHS. I do wish more tools could take in branching prioritizations or hints, I tried SCIOPT and it just didn't work as well as HiGHS even with priorization.
When I last used it for such use cases, it was better to decompose the problem into something incremental (so fixed placements become constants). Most of the latencies we saw were spent in the presolve phase which scaled with overall input size.