DD-suite: A cross-platform package to build Decision Diagrams for optimization purposes

Abstract

Decision diagrams (DDs) have become a powerful tool for discrete optimization, supporting a wide range of algorithms that span cut-generation procedures, decomposition methods, and specialized branch-and-bound searches. Despite this growth, their adoption remains limited, partly because most existing DD code is tailored to a specific algorithm or application and is therefore hard to reuse. We introduce DD-suite, a cross-platform, open-source software package for building and manipulating DDs for discrete optimization. DD-suite is available in both Python and C++ through a shared modeling interface, and lets users construct exact, restricted, and relaxed DDs for any discrete optimization problem expressed in recursive form. The package implements the DD reduction procedure, shortest-path routines for obtaining primal and dual bounds, a visualization tool, and an extensive automated test suite. Furthermore, it includes extensive documentation, a support webpage, and ready-to-use examples for four combinatorial problems. Rather than a closed solver, DD-suite is designed as an extensible building block: users can add new construction mechanisms or run custom algorithms on top of the resulting diagram, as we illustrate with a DD-based cutting plane procedure embedded in a state-of-the-art mixed-integer programming solver. Our numerical experiments show that the C++ implementation is 5-6 times faster than the Python one while producing identical diagrams, and remains within a small constant factor of ddo, a specialized Rust framework, confirming that DD-suite combines an accessible, extensible codebase with competitive performance.