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International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming

CP 2015: Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming pp 376–392Cite as

MiniSearch: A Solver-Independent Meta-Search Language for MiniZinc

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9255))

Abstract

Much of the power of CP comes from the ability to create complex hybrid search algorithms specific to an application. Unfortunately there is no widely accepted standard for specifying search, and each solver typically requires detailed knowledge in order to build complex searches. This makes the barrier to entry for exploring different search methods quite high. Furthermore, search is a core part of the solver and usually highly optimised. Any imposition on the solver writer to change this part of their system is significant.

In this paper we investigate how powerful we can make a uniform language for meta-search without placing any burden on the solver writer. The key to this is to only interact with the solver when a solution is found. We present MINISEARCH, a meta-search language that can directly use any FLATZINC solver. Optionally, it can interact with solvers through an efficient C++ API. We illustrate the expressiveness of the language and performance using different solvers on a number of examples.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National ICT Australia (NICTA) and Faculty of IT, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Andrea Rendl & Guido Tack

  2. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Tias Guns

  3. National ICT Australia (NICTA) and University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Peter J. Stuckey

Authors
  1. Andrea Rendl
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  2. Tias Guns
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  3. Peter J. Stuckey
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  4. Guido Tack
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andrea Rendl .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Gilles Pesant

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Rendl, A., Guns, T., Stuckey, P.J., Tack, G. (2015). MiniSearch: A Solver-Independent Meta-Search Language for MiniZinc. In: Pesant, G. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9255. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23219-5_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23219-5_27

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-23218-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23219-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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