Adding Search to Zinc

Abstract. We describe a small, non-intrusive extension to the declarative modelling language Zinc that allows users to define model-specific search. This is achieved by providing a number of generic search patterns that take Zinc user-defined functions as parameters. We show the generality of the approach by using it to implement three very different kinds of search: backtracking search, branch-and-bound search, and local search. Our approach is competitive with hand-coded search strategies.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CP
• Authors: Reza Rafeh, Kim Marriott, Maria Garcia de la Banda, Nicholas Nethercote, Mark Wallace
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, CP 2008, Generic Search Patterns, Hand-coded Search Strategies, Model-specific Search