Contributor
Akshit Achara

MiniZinc Interface for R


Mentors
Lars Kotthoff, Hans W. Borchers
Organization
R Project for Statistical Computing

MiniZinc is a free and open-source constraint modeling language. Constraint satisfaction and discrete optimization problems can be formulated in a high-level modeling language. Models are compiled into an intermediate representation that is understood by a wide range of solvers. MiniZinc itself provides several solvers, for instance GeoCode. The existing packages in R are not powerful enough to solve even mid-sized problems in combinatorial optimization

There are implementations of an Interface to MiniZinc in Python like MiniZinc Python and pymzn and JMiniZinc for Java but such an interface does not exist for R.

This proposal describes a way to implement a very simple and easy to use interface for R that will help R users to solve optimization problems that can't be solved with R currently.