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MiniZinc with Strings

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Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10184))

Abstract

Strings are extensively used in modern programming languages and constraints over strings of unknown length occur in a wide range of real-world applications such as software analysis and verification, testing, model checking, and web security. Nevertheless, practically no constraint programming solver natively supports string constraints. We introduce string variables and a suitable set of string constraints as builtin features of the MiniZinc modelling language. Furthermore, we define an interpreter for converting a MiniZinc model with strings into a FlatZinc instance relying only on integer variables. This conversion is obtained via rewrite rules, and does not require any extension of the existing FlatZinc specification. This provides a user-friendly interface for modelling combinatorial problems with strings, and enables both string and non-string solvers to actually solve such problems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This library, called nostrings.mzn, is publicly available at https://bitbucket.org/jossco/gecode-string.

  2. 2.

    Details at http://www.minizinc.org/doc-lib/doc-globals-extensional.html.

  3. 3.

    sunny-cp is available at https://github.com/CP-Unibo/sunny-cp. We actually took advantage of its architecture for running and evaluating the solvers in Table 2.

  4. 4.

    We assume a flattening time of \(T = 600\) seconds when the conversion time exceeded the time limit T. This happened only for MZN/Gurobi.

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Acknowledgements

The authors from the University of Melbourne are supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) through Linkage Project Grant LP140100437. The authors in Sweden are supported by the Swedish Research Council (VR) through Project Grant 2015-04910. Many thanks to Gustav Björdal for having run the experiments on his local-search backend [7] for MiniZinc. Many thanks also to all the referees and to the audience of LOPSTR 2016 for their thoughtful feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Roberto Amadini & Peter J. Stuckey

  2. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Pierre Flener, Justin Pearson & Joseph D. Scott

  3. Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Guido Tack

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  1. Roberto Amadini
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Correspondence to Roberto Amadini .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. IMDEA Software Institute and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Manuel V Hermenegildo

  2. IMDEA Software Institute and CSIC, Madrid, Spain

    Pedro Lopez-Garcia

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Amadini, R., Flener, P., Pearson, J., Scott, J.D., Stuckey, P.J., Tack, G. (2017). MiniZinc with Strings. In: Hermenegildo, M., Lopez-Garcia, P. (eds) Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation. LOPSTR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10184. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63139-4_4

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