AAAI'05 Proceedings of the 20th national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
Solving set constraint satisfaction problems using ROBDDs
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Towards robust CNF encodings of cardinality constraints
CP'07 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Principles and practice of constraint programming
MiniZinc: towards a standard CP modelling language
CP'07 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Principles and practice of constraint programming
CP'07 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Principles and practice of constraint programming
Flexible, rule-based constraint model linearisation
PADL'08 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Practical aspects of declarative languages
Compiling finite linear CSP into SAT
CP'06 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming
A Module-Based Framework for Multi-language Constraint Modeling
LPNMR '09 Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning
Boolean equi-propagation for optimized SAT encoding
CP'11 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Principles and practice of constraint programming
A system for solving constraint satisfaction problems with SMT
SAT'10 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing
Knowledge compilation with empowerment
SOFSEM'12 Proceedings of the 38th international conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science
Cell formation in group technology using constraint programming and Boolean satisfiability
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
Azucar: a SAT-based CSP solver using compact order encoding
SAT'12 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing
Boolean equi-propagation for concise and efficient SAT encodings of combinatorial problems
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Complexity issues related to propagation completeness
Artificial Intelligence
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While the efficiency and scalability of modern SAT technology offers an intriguing alternative approach to constraint solving via translation to SAT, previous work has mostly focused on the translation of specific types of constraints, such as pseudo Boolean constraints, finite integer linear constraints, and constraints given as explicit listings of allowed tuples. By contrast, we present a translation of constraint models to SAT at language level, using the recently proposed constraint modeling language MiniZinc, such that any satisfaction or optimization problem written in the language (not involving floats) can be automatically Booleanized and solved by one or more calls to a SAT solver. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of such a universal constraint solver, and report on a large-scale empirical evaluation of it against two existing solvers for MiniZinc: the finite domain solver distributed with MiniZinc and one based on the Gecode constraint programming platform. Our results indicate that Booleanization indeed offers a competitive alternative, exhibiting superior performance on some classes of problems involving large numbers of constraints and complex integer arithmetic, in addition to, naturally, problems that are already largely Boolean.