  Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) is a well-known optimization pro- blem, with
several practical applications. The most widely known MAXS AT algorithms are
ineffective at solving hard problems instances from practical application
domains. Recent work proposed using efficient Boolean Satisfiability (SAT)
solvers for solving the MaxSAT problem, based on identifying and eliminating
unsatisfiable subformulas. However, these algorithms do not scale in practice.
This paper analyzes existing MaxSAT algorithms based on unsatisfiable
subformula identification. Moreover, the paper proposes a number of key
optimizations to these MaxSAT algorithms and a new alternative algorithm. The
proposed optimizations and the new algorithm provide significant performance
improvements on MaxSAT instances from practical applications. Moreover, the
efficiency of the new generation of unsatisfiability-based MaxSAT solvers
becomes effectively indexed to the ability of modern SAT solvers to proving
unsatisfiability and identifying unsatisfiable subformulas.
