{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"The Design of ESSENCE: A Constraint Language for Specifying Combinatorial Problems","authors":[{"name":"Alan M. Frisch","slug":"alan-m-frisch","given":"Alan M.","family":"Frisch","affiliation":""},{"name":"Matthew Grum","slug":"matthew-grum","given":"Matthew","family":"Grum","affiliation":""},{"name":"Christopher Jefferson","slug":"christopher-jefferson","given":"Christopher","family":"Jefferson","affiliation":""},{"name":"Bernadette Martínez Hernández","slug":"bernadette-martinez-hernandez","given":"Bernadette Martínez","family":"Hernández","affiliation":""},{"name":"Ian Miguel","slug":"ian-miguel","given":"Ian","family":"Miguel","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"ESSENCE is a new formal language for specifying combinatorial problems in a manner similar to natural rigorous specifications that use a mixture of natural language and discrete mathematics. ESSENCE provides a high level of abstraction, much of which is the consequence of the provision of decision variables whose values can be combinatorial objects, such as tuples, sets, multisets, relations, partitions and functions. ESSENCE also allows these combinatorial objects to be nested to arbitrary depth, thus providing, for example, sets of partitions, sets of sets of partitions, and so forth. Therefore, a problem that requires finding a complex combinatorial object can be directly specified by using a decision variable whose type is precisely that combinatorial object.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/11","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/0011.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/11.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/bibtex/11","volume":{"slug":"2007","title":"Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2007","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/","year":2007,"location":"Hyderabad, India","dates":"","editors":"Ramon López de Mántaras","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":null,"track":"","number":11,"pages":{"first":80,"last":86},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}