The Zinc modelling language provides a rich set of constraints, data structures and expressions to support high-level modelling. Zinc is the only modelling language that supports all solving techniques: constraint programming, mathematical methods, and local search. By providing search patterns, it allows users to implement their search methods in a declarative way. There are currently three search patterns implemented in Zinc: backtracking search, branch and bound search, and local search. In this paper we explain how Zinc efficiently implements user-defined local search algorithms.

Lung cancer is distinguished by presenting one of the highest incidences and one of the highest rates of mortality among all other types of cancers. Detecting and curing the disease in the early stages provides the patients with a high chance of survival. 
This work aims at detecting lung nodules automatically through computerized tomography (CT) image. Accordingly, this article aim at presenting a method to improve the efficiency of the lung cancer diagnosis system, through proposing a region growing segmentation method to segment CT scan lung images. Afterwards, cancer recognition are presenting by Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) for differentiating between malignant, benign and advanced lung nodules. In the following, this paper is testing the diagnostic performances of FIS system by using artificial neural networks (ANNs). Our experiments show that the average sensitivity of the proposed method is 95%.