kbmin

kbmin is a modular software library and data format designed to facilitate knowledge-based minimum calculations in AI, optimization, and decision-support systems. It provides a unified representation for constraints, objectives, and domain rules, enabling automated minimization tasks across heterogeneous tools and runtimes.

The project originated in the research community as an open-source effort to bridge knowledge representation and optimization. Early versions offered core data schemas and bindings for Python and C++. Since then, kbmin has evolved with a plugin architecture that allows backends for SAT/SMT solvers, MILP, and custom evaluators, as well as adapters for JSON, YAML, and YAML-Like formats.

Core features include a knowledge-aware modeling language, declarative objective specification, constraint handling with both hard and soft constraints, and extensible backends. It emphasizes reproducibility through deterministic runtimes and provides profiling hooks. The license is compatible with open-source software (e.g., MIT/Apache-style).

Typical applications include robotics and autonomous systems for path or resource optimization, systems configuration in cloud environments, and operations research problems that benefit from knowledge rules to prune infeasible solutions. The kbmin ecosystem includes tutorials, reference models, and community repositories.

See also: knowledge base, optimization, constraint programming, SAT/SMT, MILP, rule-based systems.