ESSENCE is a high-level constraint specification language; it allows a combinatorial (optimisation) problem to be specified at a level of abstraction above that at which modelling decisions are made.

The most notable feature of Essence is the support for high-level nested types, for example a ‘set (size 3) of partition 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 Prime. Conjure is described in [AkgunThesis] and in [akgun2022conjure].

All the Essence models can be downloaded as a zip file