On 25-06-14 12:58, DwProd . wrote:
Thanks a lot for your answer !

1) I don't think pillar based moves are what I'm looking for, except if I can select a pillar based on a Problem Fact (its service in my case) and then spread the different entities of the pillar on the available hosts (basically setting possibly different planning variables for the entities of the pillar).

2) cartesianProductMoveSelector seem more like it, but the number of moves to combine is somewhat static is it not ? I can't for instance specify in a Planning Entity (using a property) that its move should be combined with n other moves of processes of the same type ?
That would be nearBySelection... (note: the name might change before I implement).
You need to be able to tell optaplanner that processes of the same type are "near" (~related) to each other and should be moved together.
As stated before, I am working on this for 6.2.

3) I feel like my usecase is complicated enough to have to resort to that if there is no built in way to handle it... Does this work by implementing a MoveListFactory, or a CompositeMove ? I don't think I quite get the difference to be honest...
If you write a custom MoveListFactory (or MoveIteratorFactory), you could still opt to go with the build-in moves (such as ChangeMove) or combinations of those with CompositeMove. However, because those build-in moves require reflection stuff (VariableDescriptor etc), it's probably easier to just to write a domain-specific Move.
See the examples that have custom moves.

Thanks again for your time,

Cheers,

Woody


2014-06-25 9:37 GMT+02:00 Geoffrey De Smet <ge0ffrey.spam@gmail.com>:
1) There's 2 course grained moves out of the box in 6.1.0.CR1: pillarChangeMove and pillarSwapMove.
And in 6.1.0.CR1 they also include subpillars (which is important).
  http://docs.jboss.org/drools/release/latest/optaplanner-docs/html_single/index.html#pillarChangeMoveSelector
Start with trying those.

2) Then look into cartesianProduct selection and mimic selection (see docs).
The <cartesianProductMoveSelector> allows you to combine to existing moves into a new one.
The mimic selection allows you to make sure that those 2 moves change the same entity (if needed), but a different variable of course.
I am working on nearBySelection for 6.2 to allow it to select 2 entities that are somehow "nearBy" to each other (for example in the same service etc).

3) If the above don't help enough, there's always custom moves (see docs): total freedom, but the devil is in the details :)


On 24-06-14 01:58, DwProd . wrote:
Hello there,

I'm pretty new to OptaPlanner, and I must say I'm really impressed with the maturity of it all. Great software with a great documentation !

I've been working on a variation of the Cloud Balancing example, with a few differences, which make it look like the Machine Reassignment problem as well :

- Some processes are already placed and are immovable (using a Selection Filter checking a boolean property of the planning entity)
- The Computer (the planning variable) is nullable (basically this is Multiple Muti-Dimensional Knapsack problem) which means I added a soft constraint penalty for processes with a null host.
- Processes can only be of a few classes (which I called services, a Problem Fact). Processes of a given service type have a certain amount of required cpu and ram.

Taking these elements into account, I do get very good results with OptaPlanner. However, the following constraints always put me into a score trap :

- For some services, processes work in groups. For instance, if groups are of size 3, having 7 processes is not any better than having 6 processes. If there were already 2 processes (immovable and placed), I should only add 4 processes and not 5, even if there are enough resources. For this constraint, I have tried using a rule (medium constraint) accumulating processes of that service and using the modulo operator with the group size.
- Some services are dependant on one another. For instance, I know that if I have n1 groups of processes of the service 1, I require Math.ceil(2.5*n1) groups of processes of the service 2. I have implemented this similarly with a medium constraint...

With any (or both) of these constraints, little to no processes of the concerned services are added and I fail to reach a good solution. I have tried benchmarking with several local search methods and various parameters, but all give the same results... 

I feel like the next logical step would be to used the often mentioned in the documentation "Coarse Grained Moves" but I fail to locate any simple example. The Nurse Rostering example seems to use that technique to some extent but it seems like an overly complicated example, is it not.

Thank you very much for reading this far, if you have any question, guideline, or just a trick, I'd be absolutely delighted to hear from you !

Cheers,

Woody


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