Program Synthesis for Combinatorial Optimisation Problems Position Statement *

A high-level abstract-datatype-based constraint modelling language opens the door to an automatable mpirical deter-mination-- by a synthesiser-- of how to ’best ’ represent the decision variables of a combinatorial optimisation prob-lem, based on (real-life) training instances of the problem. the extreme case where no such training instances are pro-vided, such a synthesiser would simply be non-deterministic. A first-order elational calculus is a good candidate for such a language, as it gives rise to very natural and easy-to-maintain models of combinatorial optimisation problems