TY - CHAP A1 - Chmiela, Antonia A1 - Khalil, Elias B. A1 - Gleixner, Ambros A1 - Lodi, Andrea A1 - Pokutta, Sebastian T1 - Learning to Schedule Heuristics in Branch and Bound T2 - Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021 N2 - Primal heuristics play a crucial role in exact solvers for Mixed Integer Programming (MIP). While solvers are guaranteed to find optimal solutions given sufficient time, real-world applications typically require finding good solutions early on in the search to enable fast decision-making. While much of MIP research focuses on designing effective heuristics, the question of how to manage multiple MIP heuristics in a solver has not received equal attention. Generally, solvers follow hard-coded rules derived from empirical testing on broad sets of instances. Since the performance of heuristics is instance-dependent, using these general rules for a particular problem might not yield the best performance. In this work, we propose the first data-driven framework for scheduling heuristics in an exact MIP solver. By learning from data describing the performance of primal heuristics, we obtain a problem-specific schedule of heuristics that collectively find many solutions at minimal cost. We provide a formal description of the problem and propose an efficient algorithm for computing such a schedule. Compared to the default settings of a state-of-the-art academic MIP solver, we are able to reduce the average primal integral by up to 49% on a class of challenging instances. Y1 - 2021 ER -