This document provides an introduction to modeling and programming with Gecode, an open, free, portable, accessible, and efficient environment for developing constraint-based systems and applications.

The hands-on, tutorial-style approach will get you started very quickly. The focus is on giving an overview of the key concepts and ideas required to model and program with Gecode. Each concept is introduced using concrete C++

code examples that are developed and explained step by step. This document is complemented by the complete Gecode reference documentation, as well as pointers to introductory and more advanced material throughout the text.

The first part of this document (Part M) is about modeling with Gecode. It explains modeling and solving constraint problems, and how to program, compile, link, and execute these models. This is complemented by a collection of interesting case studies of how to model with Gecode (Part C). The remaining, more advanced parts are about or programming with Gecode: they explain how to use Gecode for implementing constraints (Part P), branchings (Part B), new variable types (Part V), and search engines (Part S).