ILOG Visual CP
Generic Trace Visualization Tool based on ILOG Discovery

ILOG Visual CP is an interactive visualization software designed to help analyze and debug constraints-based programs. It is implemented as an extension of the ILOG Discovery visual data analysis software enabling loading and analyzing program traces following the gentra4cp DTD .

This extension is provided both as a service to the constraints programming community, as an advanced tool to help solver designers and programmers make sense of their programs, and as an example extension for ILOG Discovery programmers, to show how domain specific features can be integrated in the visual data analysis framework.

ILOG Visual CP complements development frameworks by providing easy to set up custom visualizations which let you: Get a sense of your program's control flow, the structure of the search tree and the propagations that occur at each step. View the solutions as well as the failed trials and compare them with each others Refine the views at will to pinpoint the bottlenecks of your programs, observe repetitive patterns and symmetries. Compare various problem instances and parameter settings visually. Because ILOG Discovery is an open visualization environment, many more types of views can be created at will, to highlight other dimensions of your program's execution: constraints relationships, variable usage and domain reductions... ILOG Visual CP and ILOG Discovery have been used with the following constraints-based programming environments: Codeine (based on Gnu-Prolog), PalM (extension of Claire), Choco, CHIP, ILOG Solver and its derivatives, as well as custom constraints based programs in Java and C++.

To install and use ILOG Visual CP:

• Download and uncompress the VisualCP.tar.gz file, using the command line:
  gzip -d VisualCP.tar.gz ; tar xf VisualCP.tar
• Then follow the installation instructions from the index.html file contained in the distribution.
  The distribution includes some documentation, illustrations, source code and examples of use.

This web site also proposes some examples and uses for ILOG Visual CP.