Competition Reports

MiniZinc provides a solver-independent modeling language that is now supported by constraint-programming solvers, mixed integer programming solvers, SAT and SAT modulo theory solvers, and hybrid solvers. Every year since 2008 we have run the MiniZinc Challenge, which compares and contrasts the different strengths of different solvers and solving technologies on a set of MiniZinc models. Here we report on what we have learned from running the competition for 6 years. MiniZinc is high level enough to express most combinatorial optimization problems easily and in a largely solverindependent way; for example, it supports sets, arrays, and user-defined predicates, some overloading, and some automatic coercions. However, MiniZinc is low level enough that it can be mapped easily onto many solvers.