Case studies

Andrew Loewenstern is using Minion and Tailor to schedule the CB1000 Nanoproteomic Analysis System. Without prior experience in constraint programming, he was able to model the problem of scheduling the movements of the robotic arm and access to the separation chamber in Essence' and solve it; improving the solution a previous approach provided significantly. Each time the machine performs a job, Minion runs and finds a schedule during the warmup phase. Andrew presented a paper describing his work at the The 15th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming.

Andreas Distler and Tom Kelsey applied Minion to the problem of finding the number of monoids of orders eight, nine, and ten. They demonstrated the scalability of Minion on very large problems which were previously unsolved. This application also shows the effectivity of the black-box approach to using Minion; i.e. solving a problem without having to tweak lots of parameters.

Their work has been published in Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.

Adam Benzan is using Minion to generate random crossword puzzles on the fly.

Minion is used in the Phoronix Test Suite to benchmark Linux.

Victor Bovdi, Eric Jespers and Alexander Konovalov are investigating units of finite orders in integral group rings, and use Minion to find possible partial augmentations (that is, sums of coefficients of group ring elements over conjugacy classes of group elements) for such units. Their work will be published in the Mathematics of Computation journal.