The G12 Project: Mapping Solver Independent Models to Efficient Solutions

The G12 project recently started by National ICT Australia (NICTA)is an ambitious project to develop a software platform for solving large scale industrial combinatorial optimisation problems. The core design involves three languages: Zinc, Cadmium and Mercury (Group 12 of the periodic table). Zinc is a declarative modelling language for expressing problems, independent of any solving methodology. Cadmium is a mapping language for mapping Zinc models to underlying solvers and/or search strategies, including hybrid approaches. Finally, existing Mercury will be extended as a language for building extensible and hybridizable solvers. The same Zinc model, used with different Cadmium mappings, will allow us to experiment with different complete, local, or hybrid search approaches for the same problem. This talk will explain the G12 global design, the final G12 objectives, and our progress so far.

Authors and Affiliations

1. NICTA Victoria Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Melbourne, 3010, Australia

   Peter J. Stuckey & Zoltan Somogyi

2. School of Comp. Sci. & Soft. Eng., Monash University, Australia

   Maria Garcia de la Banda, Kim Marriott & Mark Wallace

3. NICTA Kensington Laboratory, University of New South Wales, 2052, Australia

   Michael Maher & Toby Walsh

4. NICTA Canberra Laboratory, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia

   John Slaney

Editors and Affiliations

1. Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Informazione, Università di Bologna, Italy

   Maurizio Gabbrielli

2. Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, 75080, Richardson, TX

   Gopal Gupta

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