Authors:
Rodrigo Lankaites Pinheiro
1
;
Dario Landa-Silva
1
;
Rong Qu
1
;
Edson Yanaga
2
and
Ademir Aparecido Constantino
3
Affiliations:
1
University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
;
2
Unicesumar - Centro Universitário Cesumar, Brazil
;
3
Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Application Programming Interface, Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problems, Decision Support Systems, Research And Development.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Databases and Information Systems Integration
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Industrial Applications of Artificial Intelligence
;
Operational Research
;
Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking
;
Problem Solving
;
Scheduling and Planning
Abstract:
The literature presents many application programming interfaces (APIs) and frameworks that provide state of the art algorithms and techniques for solving optimisation problems. The same cannot be said about APIs and frameworks focused on the problem data itself because with the peculiarities and details of each variant of a problem, it is virtually impossible to provide general tools that are broad enough to be useful on a large scale. However, there are benefits of employing problem-centred APIs in a R&D environment: improving the understanding of the problem, providing fairness on the results comparison, providing efficient data structures for different solving techniques, etc. Therefore, in this work we propose a novel design methodology for an API focused on an optimisation problem. Our methodology relies on a data parser to handle the problem specification files and on a set of efficient data structures to handle the information on memory, in an intuitive fashion for researchers
and efficient for the solving algorithms. Also, we present the concepts of a solution
dispenser that can manage solutions objects in memory better than built-in garbage collectors. Finally, we describe the positive results of employing a tailored API to a project involving the development of optimisation solutions for workforce scheduling and routing problems.
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