ACE, a generic constraint solver
This provides a tool for researchers and practitioners in fields like scheduling and bio-informatics to solve constraint programming problems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing formats and methods.
The paper introduces ACE, an open-source constraint solver for combinatorial constrained problems, focusing on integer variables, table constraints, global constraints, search heuristics, and optimization, enabling modeling and solving of instances in various application fields.
Constraint Programming (CP) is a useful technology for modeling and solving combinatorial constrained problems. On the one hand, on can use a library like PyCSP3 for easily modeling problems arising in various application fields (e.g., scheduling, planning, data-mining, cryptography, bio-informatics, organic chemistry, etc.). Problem instances can then be directly generated from specific models and data. On the other hand, for solving instances (notably, represented in XCSP3 format), one can use a constraint solver like ACE, which is presented in this paper. ACE is an open-source constraint solver, developed in Java, which focuses on integer variables (including 0/1-Boolean variables), state-of-the-art table constraints, popular global constraints, search heuristics and (mono-criterion) optimization.