Output details
11 - Computer Science and Informatics
University of St Andrews
ESSENCE : A constraint language for specifying combinatorial problems
<11>The Essence constraint specification language described represents a significant advance towards automated constraint modelling, a grand challenge for the Constraint Programming field. Essence features a level of abstraction above that at which constraint modelling decisions are made. A user specifies a problem in terms of familiar concepts such as sets, relations, and functions without making the difficult step of deciding how they should be represented in a constraint model. A key feature of the language is support for decision variables with arbitrarily nested types, promoting concise problem specification. This directly influenced the subsequent development of the popular Zinc constraint language.