Conservation laws are of paramount importance in our understanding of classical and quantum dynamics. Here, we present a general framework for constructing exact quantum integrals of motion with the desired locality and quantum numbers, which will be illustrated for the case of many-body-localization (MBL). The latter has been understood theoretically in terms of the existence of an extensive number of local integrals of motion (LIOMs). Using our approach, we show that one can express the task of finding LIOMs as an optimization problem. For some specifications, this problem surprisingly connects to the question of finding classical ground states of spin-glass models. Our work unifies previous results obtained in the MBL context and reveals intriguing connections between many-body localization, spin-glass physics, and constrained optimization problems.

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• Many-body localization
• 1-dimensional spin chains
• Approximation methods for many-body systems
• Integrable systems