NCL - Natural Constraint Language - Description Language for Logic and Operations Research

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NCL Language

Unique description language with intelligent syntax for logic and operations research

Enginest focuses on data processing, artificial intelligence, operations research, logic programming and language analysis technologies. The fruit of such a technological combination is the NCL Natural Constraint Language.

The purpose of designing NCL is to offer users an easy-to-access toolkit for handling constraint satisfaction problems.

Exclusively based on math & logic standards and adopting reduced set of conventional notations, NCL’s cleanness and simplicity make it easily accessible to beginners. Concerning its problem solving capability, it is distinguished from existing products by its unique innovation:

Semantic Parser adopts pattern recognition technique in natural modeling and model diagnosing
Mixed Set Programming (over reals, integers, booleans,references and sets) models and solves complex problems at business logic level, contrary to Mixed Integer Programming that necessites linear transformation in solving a non-linear problem
Resolution rules support flexible control of search: restart of the search tree; selection of search branch by logical conditions; soft-constraint; construction of approximate solutions; heuristic rules, etc.

FEATURES
Intelligent descriptive syntax with conventional notations
Dynamic quantification permitting powerful fuzzy reasoning
Powerful set reasoning capability
Embedded state-of-the-art OR algorithms
Flexible low-level and/or partial information accessibility
Embedded SQL ...

Introduction to the NCL Language
NCL's prototype was submitted in Dec. 1997 to Third International Conference on Systems Science & Systems Engineering. J. Zhou. A unified framework for solving Boolean, integer & set constraints. Proc. of ICSSSE: 205-210, Beijing, Aug 1998.

The language was submitted in Mar. 1998 to The Journal of Logic Programming (official journal of the Logic Prog. Association). Jianyang Zhou. Introduction to the constraint language NCL. JLP 45(1-3): 71-103(2000).

Milestone achievements on the NCL language
After more than 8 years of industrialization, fruitful achievements on the NCL language have been made. Preliminary scientific information about the NCL language can be found in the following publications.
J. Zhou. "The NCL Natural Constraint Language" (in Chinese), Science Press, 236 pp, 2009.

J. Zhou. A Note on Mixed Set Programming. Proc. of The 7th International Symposium on Operations Research and Its Applications, pp. 131-140, 2008.
See also the talk given at the symposium (.pdf 172K)

J. Zhou. Routing By Mixed Set Programming. Proc. of The 8th International Symposium on Operations Research and Its Applications, pp. 157-166, 2009.

POEM Basic Course (with examples and exercises)