Installation

AutoIG makes use of several softwares, including:

  • The Essence pipeline: a constraint modelling toolchain developed by our Constraint Programming group at University of St Andrews and University of York. The pipeline supports modelling a combinatorial optimisation problem as a constraint model. Starting with an abstract specification of a constraint problem (written in Essence), the pipeline can perform the modelling and solving phases efficiently and automatically via the constraint modelling and reformulation tools Conjure [AFGJ22] and Savile Row [NAGJ17].

  • The automated algorithm configurator irace [LDCB16]: irace is a general-purpose automated tool for configuring parameters of algorithms.

  • The MiniZinc [NSBB07] toolchain: a constraint modelling toolchain developed at Monash University, in collaboration with Data61 Decision Sciences and the University of Melbourne. MiniZinc supports several solvers via their FlatZinc interfaces. AutoIG uses MiniZinc to access those solvers and generate benchmarking instances for them.

  • runsolver [Rous11]: a tool for controlling solver execution (to ensure that memory and time limit are respected).

To install all softwares, a bash script is provided in bin/install-all.sh. The script will download and install all softwares into bin/.

After installation, please set the environment variables accordingly by running the following line at the beginning of each bash session:

. bin/set-path.sh

References

AFGJ22

Akgün, Ö., Frisch, A.M., Gent, I.P., Jefferson, C., Miguel, I. and Nightingale, P., 2022. Conjure: Automatic Generation of Constraint Models from Problem Specifications. Artificial Intelligence, p.103751.

NAGJ17

Nightingale, P., Akgün, Ö., Gent, I.P., Jefferson, C., Miguel, I. and Spracklen, P., 2017. Automatically improving constraint models in Savile Row. Artificial Intelligence, 251, pp.35-61.

LDCB16

López-Ibáñez, M., Dubois-Lacoste, J., Cáceres, L.P., Birattari, M. and Stützle, T., 2016. The irace package: Iterated racing for automatic algorithm configuration. Operations Research Perspectives, 3, pp.43-58.

NSBB07

Nethercote, N., Stuckey, P.J., Becket, R., Brand, S., Duck, G.J. and Tack, G., 2007, September. MiniZinc: Towards a standard CP modelling language. In International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (pp. 529-543). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Rous11

Roussel, O., 2011. Controlling a solver execution with the runsolver tool. Journal on Satisfiability, Boolean Modeling and Computation, 7(4), pp.139-144.