L The Automated Generation of Constraint Programs
The Automated Generation of Constraint Programs



This project is conducted by researchers at the University of York and the University of St. Andrews. The project's aim is to develop an automated system that, given a specification of a problem, can generate one or more constraint programs that can solve the problem.

  • A short overview of the project. (This paper appeared in In D. Berry, A. Bundy and J. Fleuriot (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Automated Reasoning, 2005.)

ESSENCE is a language we are developing; it allows a combinatorial (optimisation) problem to be sepcified at a level of abstraction above that at which modelling decisions are made. Version 1.1.0 of the language is now fully defined.


CONJURE is a rule-based system that refines an ESSENCE Specification into a concrete constraint program that is similar to programs supported by existing constraint-solving toolkits.


ESSENCE' is a close to a subset of ESSENCE that provides a level of abstraction comparable to that provided by existing constraint toolkits and languages. It is therefore a constraint modelling langauge rather than a problem specification language. ESSENCE' is basically ESSENCE with all the features for abstraction removed .


Related Papers






Department of Computer Science, University of York
School of Computer Science, University of St. Andrews

This web-page is maintained by Alan Frisch, and was last changed on 14 June 2011.