Optimal general offset assignment

We present an exact approach to the General Offset Assignment problem arising in the domain of address code generation for application specific and digital signal processors. General Offset Assignment is composed of two subproblems, namely to find a permutation of variables in memory and to select a responsible address register for each access to one of these variables. Our method is a combination of established techniques to solve both subproblems using integer linear programming. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first approach capable of solving almost all instances of the established OffsetStone benchmark set to global optimality within reasonable time. We provide a first comprehensive evaluation of the quality of several state-of-the-art heuristics relative to the optimal solutions.