[gecode-users] xml (xcsp) constraints and gecode

[Guido Tack]

Hi!

nicdetinguy at aol.com wrote:

> To tell you the truth, my project  mainly consists  in  testing   
> the performances of various solvers and therefore recquires the use  
> of the solver competition format xcsp, where the constraints are  
> formulated in .xml files. As I did not intend to re-write every set  
> of constraints for each solver, which would be both time consuming  
> and performance altering, the only objective way of comparing the  
> solvers was to give them the same input: the xcsp files. That's why  
> I was wondering whether such a parser existed for Gecode.

If you are going to write such a parser yourself, you might want to  
take advantage of the FlatZinc interface for Gecode, available from  
http://www.gecode.org/flatzinc.html. It's probably easier to write a  
converter from xcsp to FlatZinc than a complete front-end.

As soon as you have the benchmarks ready, we'd like to encourage you  
to send them to us so that we can have a look. That way, we (and you)  
can make sure that no modeling or conversion artefact renders the  
numbers you get meaningless.

Cheers,
	Guido

-- 
Guido Tack
Programming Systems Lab, Saarland University, Germany
http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~tack