Paths, Proofs, and Perfection: Developing a Human-Interpretable Proof System for Constrained Shortest Paths

People want to rely on optimization algorithms for complex decisions but verifying the optimality of the solutions can then become a valid concern, particularly for critical decisions taken by non-experts in optimization. One example is the shortest-path problem on a network, occurring in many contexts from transportation to logistics to telecommunications. While the standard shortest-path problem is both solvable in polynomial time and certifiable by duality, introducing side constraints makes solving and certifying the solutions much harder. We propose a proof system for constrained shortest-path problems, which gives a set of logical rules to derive new facts about feasible solutions. The key trait of the proposed proof system is that it specifically includes high-level graph concepts within its reasoning steps (such as connectivity or path structure), in contrast to using linear combinations of model constraints. Using our proof system, we can provide a step-by-step, human-auditable explanation showing that the path given by an external solver cannot be improved. Additionally, to maximize the advantages of this setup, we propose a proof search procedure that specifically aims to find small proofs of this form using a procedure similar to A* search. We evaluate our proof system on constrained shortest path instances generated from real-world road networks and experimentally show that we may indeed derive more interpretable proofs compared to an integer programming approach, in some cases leading to much smaller proofs.