Can subset of SimCity ( BuildIt) economy expressed in Minizinc?

Question

I would like to write a solver for scheduling production in SimCity buildit. As I am a total beginner with Minizinc ( and solvers in general - blush), I am not sure whether what I want to try makes sense at all.

• In SimCity one needs to produce resources ( iron, wood, seeds, plastic, ...) first and can then use them to create products ( hammers, nails, boards ).
• Resources and products may be combined to create other products ( e.g. a chair may require wood, hammer and nails ).
• Resources can be produced in parallel ( each factory has e.g. 5 slots to produce any kind of resource, but no queueing ).
• Products are created in topic related shops (e.g. furniture, tools, etc.) sequentially ( with a - limited length - production queue ).
• Storage for resources & products is shared and limited.

What I would like to understand is whether the creation of a planner to spit out the fastest possible schedule for a list of items to be produced is possible in Minizinc at all or whether I better start explicit coding right away ?

Answer 1

These kinds of problems can be solved using MiniZinc, although I haven't heard of somebody solving this specific problem. Your problem seems to be closely related to the jobshop problem. This problem might provide a good baseline and there are various models for versions of this problem to start from. You can find many example models (of varying quality) in the MiniZinc benchmark repository: https://github.com/MiniZinc/minizinc-benchmarks

As Patrick Trentin pointed out, you have to keep in mind the complexity of the kinds of problems that are solved using MiniZinc. Often the time to solve them can grow exponentially or even worse. To find solution to the hard problems both the way in which the problem is modelled and the techniques the solver uses (and which solver to use) to solve the problem has be taken into account. If you are just getting started with MiniZinc I would suggest following the MiniZinc Coursera courses, which will get you started in no time: https://www.coursera.org/learn/basic-modeling