An integrated modelling, debugging, and visualisation environment for G12

  • Authors:

  • Andreas Bauer;Viorica Botea;Mark Brown;Matt Gray;Daniel Harabor;John Slaney

  • Affiliations:

  • National ICT Australia and The Australian National University;National ICT Australia;National ICT Australia;National ICT Australia and The Australian National University;National ICT Australia and The Australian National University;National ICT Australia and The Australian National University

  • Venue:
  • CP'10 Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Principles and practice of constraint programming
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We present G12IDE, a front-end for the G12 platform aimed at helping users create and work with constraint models in a manner independent from any underlying solver. G12IDE contains tools for writing and evaluating models using Zinc and provides a feature rich debugger for monitoring a running search process. Debugging a search, as opposed to debugging sequential code, requires concepts such as breakpoints and queries to be applied at a higher level than in standard debuggers. Our solution is to let users define special events which, once reached in a search, cause the debugger to halt and give back, possibly in a visual manner, useful information on the current state of the search. G12IDE also includes a number of visualisation tools for drawing graphs and trees, and additionally allows users to create arbitrary domain-specific visualisations, such as the drawing of a sequential plan when the constraint problem is in fact a planning problem. The inclusion of such powerful and flexible visualisation toolkit and its tight integration with the available debugging facilities is, to the best of our knowledge, completely novel.