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MiniZinc and FlatZinc

MiniZinc is a medium-level modelling language. It is high-level enough to express most CP problems easily, but low-level enough that it can be mapped onto existing solvers easily and consistently. It is a subset of the higher-level language Zinc. We hope it will be adapted as a standard by the CP community.

FlatZinc is a low-level solver input language that is the target language for MiniZinc. It is designed to be easy to translate into the form required by a CP solver.

This page holds various MiniZinc and FlatZinc resources that are of wide interest.

• MiniZinc: Towards A Standard CP Modelling Language.  Paper about MiniZinc, FlatZinc, and the mapping between them.

• Specifications of Zinc, MiniZinc and FlatZinc.  The specifications from the MiniZinc home page.

• Converting MiniZinc to FlatZinc.  The official specification for the MiniZinc-to-FlatZinc conversion. Has some overlap with the relevant section in the MiniZinc paper, but is more detailed, especially on how built-ins are translated.

• G12 MiniZinc distribution.  The G12 MiniZinc distribution contains executables for the G12 MiniZinc-to-FlatZinc converter and the G12 FlatZinc interpreter. It also contains the source code for the MiniZinc-to-FlatZinc converter, as well as lots of example models and documentation.

• G12 Bugs Database.  Please report any bugs in the MiniZinc distribution here. We are using the Mantis bug-tracking system.

• FlatZinc front end for Gecode.

• FlatZinc lex/yacc grammar.  Includes a Makefile. This code is in the public domain, and so can be used by anyone to create a FlatZinc front-end for their solver.