Cases

Case studies

I’ve written a blog post about a successful application of Minion.
Gordon Royle has written a blog post on how he used Minion to search for graphs with
spanning 2-regular subgraphs of a graph, when searching for Hamilton cycles.

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.

Amba Kulkarni, Sheetal Pokar and Devanand Shukl of the University of Hyderabad
are using Minion to develop a constraint based parser for Sanskrit. Their
efforts are described in this
publication.

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 investigated units of
finite orders in integral group rings, and used 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 paper, Torsion units in integral group rings of Janko simple groups, is published in the Mathematics of Computation journal.

Victor Bovdi, Alexander Konovalov and Steve Linton also used Minion and GAP together to find
Torsion units in integral group rings of Conway simple groups. This work is published
in the International Journal of Algebra and Computation.

The Institute for Software Technology at
the Graz University of Technology is using Minion for debugging and testing
programmes.

Jean-Michel Rey at the Etang Vallier Resort uses Minion
to run an automated booking system for chalets and other accommodation.

Minion was used in the paper Model-based simulation and configuration of mobile
phone networks – The SIMOA approach presented at WAITS 2012 workshop, at ECAI 2012.

There are many more people who use Minion in their work and cite it in their
papers. A list of citations can be obtained from Google
Scholar.

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