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XCSP3 and its ecosystem

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a summary of XCSP3, together with its ecosystem. XCSP3 is a format used to build integrated representations of combinatorial constrained problems. Interestingly, XCSP3 preserves the structure of models, by handling arrays of variables and groups/blocks of constraints, which makes it rather unique in the literature. Furthermore, the ecosystem of XCSP3 is well supplied: it includes companion tools (parsers and checkers), a website with a search engine for selecting and downloading instances, and competitions of solvers. The Java-based modeling API, called JvCSP3, is the last developed piece of this complete production chain.

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Notes

  1. JvCSP3 was previously called MCSP3.

  2. When ordered is defined over lists of variables, it becomes more complex. It can be called lex [19] in XCSP3.

  3. Other competitions exist in the community: SAT, PB and MiniZinc competitions, for example.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the project CPER Data from the region “Hauts-de-France”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CRIL-CNRS, UMR 8188, University of Artois, Lens, France

    Gilles Audemard, Frédéric Boussemart, Christophe Lecoutre, Cédric Piette & Olivier Roussel

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  1. Gilles Audemard
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  2. Frédéric Boussemart
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  3. Christophe Lecoutre
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  5. Olivier Roussel
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Correspondence to Gilles Audemard.

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Audemard, G., Boussemart, F., Lecoutre, C. et al. XCSP3 and its ecosystem. Constraints 25, 47–69 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10601-019-09307-9

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