package ortools_solvers

OCaml interface to Google OR-Tools

Currently only a subset of CP-SAT is supported.

Pull requests providing the missing features are welcome, but please pay attention to documentation and tests.

This project provides two packages:

• ortools is an OCaml interface for building CP-SAT models. It does not require an installation of OR-Tools as it simply works with the protocol buffer format. See utils/sat_solve_pb.{c,py} for examples of interfacing with the CP-SAT solver.
• ortools_solvers builds on ortools to provide a simple OCaml interface for calling CP-SAT. This package builds its own version of OR-Tools and the libraries abseil, re2, protobuf, and protobuf-c.

Online docs: https://inria.github.io/ocaml-ortools/

opam install ocamlfind ortools_solvers
ocamlfind ocamlopt -o cp_is_fun_sat.exe \
            -package ortools_solvers -linkpkg \
            samples/sat/cp_is_fun_sat.ml
./cp_is_fun_sat.exe

TODOs

• Finish migrating OR-Tools sat/samples
• Use alcotest to test the interface.
• CP-SAT: Support Interval constraints
• CP-SAT: Support NoOverlap constraints
• CP-SAT: Support NoOverlap2D constraints
• CP-SAT: Support Element constraints
• CP-SAT: Support Circuit constraints
• CP-SAT: Support Routes constraints
• CP-SAT: Support Table constraints
• CP-SAT: Support Automaton constraints
• CP-SAT: Support Inverse constraints
• CP-SAT: Support Reservoir constraints
• CP-SAT: Support Cumulative constraints
• CP-SAT: Support Dummy constraints
• Support other solvers

Dune

The ortools-solvers package tries to solve the difficulties of installing CP-SAT on a given platform and calling it from an OCaml program. To do this, the source of OR-Tools and required libraries is included in the package and built with the OCaml interface.

On macOS, the build relies on the homebrew packages protobuf, protobuf-c, and re2, and also an internal build of eigen3. On Linux, all of these libraries are built internally.

There are currently a number of known imperfections based on assumed limitations of dune (at the time of writing):

1. The build assumes that it is possible to run cmake -j 8 (ortools_solvers/dune). Running without any parallelism is much slower, but requesting too much parallelism can overwhelm the build machine. Dune does not currently provide a way of sharing cores between itself and an external build process controlled by cmake/make. See this discussion.
2. To run an OCaml program that uses ortools-solvers, the loader must be able to find libortools.so (and also libabsl_log_internal_message.so, libabsl_raw_logging_internal.so, libabsl_raw_hash_set.so, and protobuf.so). This is not a problem once ortools-solvers is installed since the stub uses $CAMLORIGIN to specify the -L and -rpath flags (ortools_solvers/stubs/dune). However, to test against a local build before installation, it is necessary to manually set and export either DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH (macOS) or LD_LIBRARY_PATH (Linux). This is also the reason why the build does not try to run such tests, e.g., by running the programs in samples/sat, during continuous integration. (DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=_build/install/default/lib/ortools_solvers dune exec -- samples/sat/cp_is_fun_sat.exe).