Preface

This document is made for anyone who wants to learn constraint programming using MiniCP as a support.

This tutorial will continuously evolve. Don’t hesitate to give us feedback or suggestions for improvement. You are also welcome to report any mistake or bug.

What is MiniCP

The success of the MiniSAT solver has largely contributed to the dissemination of (CDCL) SAT solvers. The MiniSAT solver has a neat and minimalist architecture that is well documented. We believe the CP community is currently missing such a solver that would permit newcomers to demystify the internals of CP technology. We introduce MiniCP, a white-box bottom-up teaching framework for CP implemented in Java. MiniCP is voluntarily missing many features that you would find in a commercial or complete open-source solver. The implementation, although inspired by state-of-the-art solvers, is not focused on efficiency but rather on readability to convey the concepts as clearly as possible. MiniCP is small and well tested.

Javadoc

The Javadoc API.

Install MiniCP

MiniCP source code is available from bitbucket.

Using an IDE

We recommend using IntelliJ or Eclipse.

From IntelliJ you can import the project:

Open > (select pom.xml in the minicp directory and open as new project)

From Eclipse you can import the project:

Import > Maven > Existing Maven Projects (select minicp directory)

From the command line

Using maven command line you can do:

$mvn compile # compile all the project
$mvn test    # run all the test suite

Some other useful commands:

$mvn checkstyle:checktyle   # generates a report in target/site/checkstyle.html
$mvn findbugs:gui           # opens a gui with potential source of bugs in your code
$mvn jacoco:report          # creates a cover report in target/site/jacoco/index.html
$mvn javadoc:javadoc        # creates javadoc in target/site/apidocs/index.html

Getting Help with MiniCP

You’ll get the greatest chance of getting answers to your questions by using the MiniCP usergroup.

Who Uses MiniCP?

If you use it for teaching or for research, please let us know and we will add you in this list.

  • UCLouvain, INGI2365 Teacher: Pierre Schaus.
  • ACP, Summer School 2017, Porquerolles, France, Teacher: Pierre Schaus.
  • Université de Nice Master in CS Teacher: Arnaud Malapert and Marie Pelleau

Citing MiniCP

If you find MiniCP useful for your research or teaching you can cite:

@article{cite-key,
        Author = {Michel, L. and Schaus, P. and Van Hentenryck, P.},
        Doi = {10.1007/s12532-020-00190-7},
        Id = {Michel2021},
        Isbn = {1867-2957},
        Journal = {Mathematical Programming Computation},
        Number = {1},
        Pages = {133-184},
        Title = {MiniCP: a lightweight solver for constraint programming},
        Ty = {JOUR},
        Url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s12532-020-00190-7},
        Volume = {13},
        Year = {2021}}