JMiniZinc

JMiniZinc

JMiniZinc is a Java interface to the constraint modeling language MiniZinc. It provides an API to generate MiniZinc models, to start MiniZinc compilers and solvers (which are not part of JMiniZinc), and to parse the output of solvers.

Project Structure

JMiniZinc is separated into three subprojects:

• core contains the core functionality for generating and solving MiniZinc models.
• diag contains various tools for model-based diagnosis.
• diag.ui adds a user interface on top of the diag component.

Building

JMiniZinc uses Maven to manage its building process. Executing

$ mvn clean install

in any of the subprojects will automatically fetch all dependencies (declared in pom.xml) and compile the project. Executing this command in the com.siemens.jminizinc subfolder will build all components at once.

Artifacts generated will be placed in the target/ folders in the subprojects. Most notably you’ll find there JAR files called core-1.2.jar, diag-1.2.jar and so on.

Usage

You should be able to figure out quickly how to use JMiniZinc by looking at our JUnit tests, especially NQueensDemo. First you construct a MiniZinc model by adding Variables, Constraints etc. to a ModelBuilder, Then you add additional syntactical elements (e.g. a solving strategy) to a ModelWriter and let the resulting model be solved by an Executor. For the Executors to work, executables minizinc, mzn2fzn, … should be available on your PATH.

Development Status

JMiniZinc is still in development, so you´ll stumble upon some inline TODOs when looking through the code. However, it is stable enough for many use cases and has been successfully used in various projects already. Feel free to contribute by fixing open TODOs or adding features!

References

The API design follows the official MiniZinc specification.