ESSENCE is a high-level constraint specification language; it allows a combinatorial (optimisation) problem to be sepcified at a level of abstraction above that at which modelling decisions are made. Version 1.1.0 of the language is now fully defined.

The most notable feature of ESSENCE is the support for high-level nested types, for example a ‘set (size 3) of partitions of int(1..20)’.

There has been one publicly available implementation of ESSENCE:

• CONJURE is a complete implementation of the ESSENCE language, which maps ESSENCE to ESSENCE’. CONJURE is described in [akgunPhDThesis]

All the Essence models can be downloaded as a zip file