[rules-users] [planner][5.3.0.Final] Benchmark

[Guilherme Kunigami]

I'm trying to upgrade from drools 5.2.0 to 5.3.0 and having some
difficulties with the planner benchmark.

I'd like to make a set of move factories common to all local search solvers,
by adding them to inheritedSolverBenchmark block. But it seems that the
localSearch environment always requires a selector, so I can't specify the
localSearch environment for the solverBenchmark's  without providing a
selector. Here's a piece of code that gives runtime error:
http://paste.ubuntu.com/718806/

The error is:
Exception in thread main java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: A selector
requires configuration, for example a moveFactoryClass.

--- Note ---

If I understood correcly, the following configuration from examination
examples:

examinationStepLimitSolverBenchmarkConfig.xml

contains a bug, because it specifies a maximum step count for a general
solver

termination
maximumStepCount70/maximumStepCount
/termination

This gave the following exception:

Exception in thread main java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException:
StepCountTermination can only be used for phase termination.

Thanks,
___
rules-users mailing list
rules-users@lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users

Re: [rules-users] [planner] Performance question

[Guilherme Kunigami]

2011/10/19 Geoffrey De Smet ge0ffrey.s...@gmail.com

 **


 Op 19-10-11 15:00, Guilherme Kunigami schreef:



 In this use case, that is probably a bad idea in my experience. Why? Well
 I hope this makes any sense:
 *You need to allow the optimization algorithms to break it now and then
 to tunnel through a bad search space into another good search space.*
 If it doesn't, don't worry.


  Hmm, I think I understood it. Allowing infeasible solutions may help to
 scape from local minima in the space of feasible solutions for example.

 Yep :)

rule Avoid conflicting activities
 when
  Assignment($room1 : room, $act1: activity, $id : activity.id)
  Assignment(room== $room1, room != null, $act2 : activity, activity.id 
 $id)
  Conflict(act1 == $act1, act2 == $act2)

  I would put Conflict first. But try it this way too and let me know which
 works better ;) I don't know.
 Stated differently: Instead of checking every 2 simultaneous assignments
 if they are a conflict,
 I would check if every 2 conflict assignments are simultaneous (like in
 examinationScoreRules.drl).


  Ok! I will perform some stress tests to verify which one works better.

 Nice, please report your results to this mailing list. It doesn't matter if
 they are worse, better or equal: it's interesting to know.

 Look for stepLimit in the examples to see how I do very short stress
 tests when adding extra constraints.


I've made a test with each model limited to 70 steps. I've attached a graph
comparing both runs using drools planner benchmark.
It  seems that using Conflict first is indeed faster :)



 ___
 rules-users mailing list
 rules-users@lists.jboss.org
 https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users


attachment: solution2Statistic.png___
rules-users mailing list
rules-users@lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users

[rules-users] [planner] Performance question

[Guilherme Kunigami]

Consider I have a set of N activities with a given start and end times and I
want to assign them to a set of rooms.

One of the main rules is to avoid two activities that have time conflicts,
to be assigned to the same room. I devised three modelling options:

[1] Do it entirely in Java code, checking whether there will be a conflict
before allowing an Assignment move. This way, all solutions that the
algorithm works with are feasible.

[2] Do it using drools rules, like the following:

rule Avoid conflicting activities
when
Assignment($room1: room, $act1: activity, $id : activity.id)
 Assignment(room == $room1, room!= null, $act2 : activity, activity.id 
$id)
eval(Activity.conflict($act1, $act2))
then
insertLogical(new IntConstraintOccurrence(conflictingActivities,
ConstraintType.NEGATIVE_HARD,
10, null));
end

Here I'm using Assignment as the only planning entity. There's an assignment
for each activity and it may point to a room or to null in the case the
activity is not assigned. In the case above, I have a static function that
checks whether two activities conflicts. This way, solutions may be
infeasible but with high penalties the best solution found will eventually
be feasible.

I also thought of a third option, which is to insert a fact Conflict for
each pair of conflicting activities in a preprocessing phase. This way we
would end up with:

rule Avoid conflicting activities
when
Assignment($room1 : room, $act1: activity, $id : activity.id)
Assignment(room== $room1, room != null, $act2 : activity, activity.id  $id)
Conflict(act1 == $act1, act2 == $act2)
then
insertLogical(new IntConstraintOccurrence(conflictingActivities,
ConstraintType.NEGATIVE_HARD,
10, null));
end

The problem is that there may be up to O(N^2) such objects.

I do not know the rules engine algorithm in depth, so I'd like to know: Is
any of these approaches more efficient than the others?

Thanks!
___
rules-users mailing list
rules-users@lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users

Re: [rules-users] [planner] Performance question

[Guilherme Kunigami]

2011/10/19 Geoffrey De Smet ge0ffrey.s...@gmail.com

 **


 Op 19-10-11 14:16, Guilherme Kunigami schreef:

 Consider I have a set of N activities with a given start and end times and
 I want to assign them to a set of rooms.

  One of the main rules is to avoid two activities that have time
 conflicts, to be assigned to the same room. I devised three modelling
 options:

  [1] Do it entirely in Java code, checking whether there will be a
 conflict before allowing an Assignment move. This way, all solutions that
 the algorithm works with are feasible.

 In the manual that's called a build-in hard constraint. Look for it.

 In this use case, that is probably a bad idea in my experience. Why? Well I
 hope this makes any sense:
 *You need to allow the optimization algorithms to break it now and then to
 tunnel through a bad search space into another good search space.*
 If it doesn't, don't worry.


Hmm, I think I understood it. Allowing infeasible solutions may help to
scape from local minima in the space of feasible solutions for example.




  [2] Do it using drools rules, like the following:

  rule Avoid conflicting activities
 when
  Assignment($room1: room, $act1: activity, $id : activity.id)
  Assignment(room == $room1, room!= null, $act2 : activity, activity.id 
 $id)
  eval(Activity.conflict($act1, $act2))

 Why calculate it every time if you can cache it? [3]

  then
  insertLogical(new IntConstraintOccurrence(conflictingActivities,
 ConstraintType.NEGATIVE_HARD,
 10, null));
 end

  Here I'm using Assignment as the only planning entity. There's an
 assignment for each activity and it may point to a room or to null in the
 case the activity is not assigned. In the case above, I have a static
 function that checks whether two activities conflicts. This way, solutions
 may be infeasible but with high penalties the best solution found will
 eventually be feasible.

  [3]

  I also thought of a third option, which is to insert a fact Conflict
 for each pair of conflicting activities in a preprocessing phase. This way
 we would end up with:

 This is the recommended way. It's called cached problem facts in the
 manual.
 See the TopicConflict use in the examinationScoreRules.drl and
 Examination.getProblemFacts() in the examples.


  rule Avoid conflicting activities
 when
  Assignment($room1 : room, $act1: activity, $id : activity.id)
  Assignment(room== $room1, room != null, $act2 : activity, activity.id 
 $id)
  Conflict(act1 == $act1, act2 == $act2)

 I would put Conflict first. But try it this way too and let me know which
 works better ;) I don't know.
 Stated differently: Instead of checking every 2 simultaneous assignments if
 they are a conflict,
 I would check if every 2 conflict assignments are simultaneous (like in
 examinationScoreRules.drl).


Ok! I will perform some stress tests to verify which one works better.

Thanks again,


  then
  insertLogical(new IntConstraintOccurrence(conflictingActivities,
 ConstraintType.NEGATIVE_HARD,
 10, null));
 end

  The problem is that there may be up to O(N^2) such objects.

  I do not know the rules engine algorithm in depth, so I'd like to know:
 Is any of these approaches more efficient than the others?

 [3] is definitely faster than [2].


  Thanks!


 ___
 rules-users mailing 
 listrules-users@lists.jboss.orghttps://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users


 --
 With kind regards,
 Geoffrey De Smet


 ___
 rules-users mailing list
 rules-users@lists.jboss.org
 https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users


___
rules-users mailing list
rules-users@lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users

Re: [rules-users] [planner] Problem setting configuration file

[Guilherme Kunigami]

Hi,

2011/10/14 Geoffrey De Smet ge0ffrey.s...@gmail.com

 **

 I was wondering now if I can achieve the same with the drools rule file.

 That's a bit harder, but not that hard.
 Look in the Drools Planner manual for setRuleBase() (as an alternative to
 using scoreDrl's in your SolverConfig.xml)
 and look in the Drools Expert manual on how to create a RuleBase.


Great, that worked too!

Just for future reference, I used the following tutorial to create a rule
base:
http://hydrogen.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/wiki/index.php/How_to_create_and_execute_a_Drools_rulebase

And
http://docs.jboss.org/drools/release/5.2.0.Final/drools-planner-docs/html/ch04.html#d0e1566
to
set the rule base.

Thank you for the help!



 Op 13-10-11 15:37, Guilherme Kunigami schreef:

 Geoffrey,

  Thank you, that worked!

  I was wondering now if I can achieve the same with the drools rule file.
 The method below wouldn't work because it's not me who load the file (I
 think it's at AbstractSolverConfig.buildRuleBase, which seems to use
 getResourceAsStream too).


 2011/10/11 Geoffrey De Smet ge0ffrey.s...@gmail.com

  Hi Guilharme,

 There's an overloaded method called configure(InputStream in) and
 configure(Reader reader)  too, use either of those instead:

 try {
   InputStream in = new FileInputStream(
 /path/to/xml/file/SolverConf.xml);
   configurer.configure(in);
 } finally {
   IOUtils.closeSilently(in);
 }

 Op 11-10-11 15:01, Guilherme Kunigami schreef:

  Hi,

  I'm trying to load a configuration file (namely SolverConf.xml) into
 XmlSolver with the code below:

  XmlSolverConfigurer configurer = new XmlSolverConfigurer();
 configurer.configure(SOLVER_CONFIG);
 Solver solver = configurer.buildSolver();

  If I bundle SolverConf.xml file with the application .jar file, then
 using SOLVER_CONFIG as /path/to/xml/file/SolverConf.xml works fine.

  But I want to use SolverConf.xml outside the .jar, so I can easiliy edit
 it, but I don't know what path should I pass to it.

  I know it's a Java related question, but I was wondering if anyone had a
 similar problem when configuring drools planner. (I've asked on
 stackoverflow, but none of the answers worked for me:
 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7718807/can-getresourceasstream-find-files-outside-the-jar-file
 )

  (Supposing my .jar is in /some/path and the SolverConf.xml will be on
 /some/path/conf for example)

  Thanks,



 ___
 rules-users mailing 
 listrules-users@lists.jboss.orghttps://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users


 --
 With kind regards,
 Geoffrey De Smet


 ___
 rules-users mailing list
 rules-users@lists.jboss.org
 https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users



 ___
 rules-users mailing 
 listrules-users@lists.jboss.orghttps://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users


 --
 With kind regards,
 Geoffrey De Smet


 ___
 rules-users mailing list
 rules-users@lists.jboss.org
 https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users


___
rules-users mailing list
rules-users@lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users

Re: [rules-users] [planner] The presumed score is corrupted

[Guilherme Kunigami]

2011/10/14 Geoffrey De Smet ge0ffrey.s...@gmail.com

 **
 In your doMove you're doing:

 crew.addActivity(activity);
 remainingActivities.remove(activity);

 If crew and/or remainingActivities are used by your score rules, the
 working memory should be notified of their changes.
 That's causing the corruption


Hmm, actually the only object that are being used by the score rules is an
activity. Here's the corresponding .drl:

rule remainingActivitiesCount
 when
$remainingCount : Number() from accumulate(
  $activity : ActivityBundle(),
sum(1)
)
then
insertLogical(new
IntConstraintOccurrence(remainingActivitiesCount,
ConstraintType.NEGATIVE_HARD,
$remainingCount.intValue(),
null));
end



 Extra advice:
 I think you're making your moves too complex and your domain model too
 complex.
 If you upgrade to 5.3, it will be hard to identify the planning entities.
 There will be many (and I doubt you need more than 1).
 Read

 http://docs.jboss.org/drools/release/5.3.0.CR1/drools-planner-docs/html_single/index.html#d0e1411
 and specificly this note in that chapter:

 *Do not create unnecessary planning entity classes.* This leads to
 difficult Move implementations and slower score calculation.

 For example, do not create a planning entity class to hold the total free
 time of a teacher, which needs to be kept up to date as the Lectureplanning 
 entities change. Instead, calculate the free time in the score
 constraints and put the result per teacher into a logically inserted score
 object.

 If historic data needs to be considered too, then create problem fact to
 hold the historic data up to, but *not including*, the planning window (so
 it doesn't change when a planning entity changes) and let the score
 constraints take it into account.


Thanks for the advice. I'll rethink my model and try to use a single
planning entity.





 Op 14-10-11 15:48, Guilherme Kunigami schreef:



 2011/10/14 Geoffrey De Smet ge0ffrey.s...@gmail.com

  Probably you forgot to notify the workingMemory.update in the doMove
 method:

 public void doMove(WorkingMemory workingMemory) {
 FactHandle factHandle = workingMemory.getFactHandle(activity);
 activity.setAssignee(...);
 workingMemory.update(factHandle, activity);
 }

 Op 14-10-11 09:21, Geoffrey De Smet schreef:

 A corrupted score normally indicates a problem with the Move
 implementation (or sometimes the score drl).

 Basically this happened: for a number of moves, it did the move,
 calculated the score and undo the move.
 One of those move was associated with a score -10hard/0soft, that was the
 best one.
 Now, it does that move (which is now called the step) and when it
 calculates the score it's a different score 0hard/0soft.

 Try TRACE environment and see if it crashes sooner. Copy paste your Move
 implementation here.


  Using the TRACE environment gave the same results of DEBUG.

  Here's my move implementation, as well as the snipet of drools rule file
 that calculates the score based on remaining activities:

 http://pastebin.mozilla.org/1355014


   In Planner 5.4 there will be 2 out-of-the-box Move implementations to
 use, so writing Move's become optional.

   Cool!

  By the way, I'm using Drools 5.2.0 final.

  Thanks,


 Op 13-10-11 16:37, Guilherme Kunigami schreef:

 Hi,

  I've implemented a very simple application using drools planner
 consisting of a bunch of activities. My rule file is very simple too and
 just counts the number of activities not assigned. When I run
 Solver.solve(), I get the following error message:

  Exception in thread AWT-EventQueue-0 java.lang.IllegalStateException:
 The presumedScore (-10hard/0soft) is corrupted because it is not the
 realScore  (0hard/0soft).

  Presumed workingMemory:
   Score rule (remainingActivitiesCount) has count (1) and weight total
 (11).
 Real workingMemory:
   Score rule (remainingActivitiesCount) has count (1) and weight total
 (0).

  I've tracked down this message and found this piece of code
 @DefaultLocalSearchSolver.solveImplementation():

   // there is no need to recalculate the score, but we still need to set
 it

 localSearchSolverScope.getWorkingSolution().setScore(localSearchStepScope.getScore());
 if (assertStepScoreIsUncorrupted) {

 localSearchSolverScope.assertWorkingScore(localSearchStepScope.getScore());
 }

  It seems that the working score is never updated along the algorithm,
 but the score in the working memory changes. Thus, when we use the DEBUG
 environment, assertStepScoreIsUncorrupted is turned on and the assertion
 fails.

  Should the score be updated or am I using the library incorrectly?

  Thanks,


 ___
 rules-users mailing 
 listrules-users@lists.jboss.orghttps://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users


 --
 With kind regards,
 Geoffrey De Smet

Re: [rules-users] [planner] The presumed score is corrupted

[Guilherme Kunigami]

2011/10/14 Geoffrey De Smet ge0ffrey.s...@gmail.com

 **
 Probably you forgot to notify the workingMemory.update in the doMove
 method:

 public void doMove(WorkingMemory workingMemory) {
 FactHandle factHandle = workingMemory.getFactHandle(activity);
 activity.setAssignee(...);
 workingMemory.update(factHandle, activity);
 }

 Op 14-10-11 09:21, Geoffrey De Smet schreef:

 A corrupted score normally indicates a problem with the Move implementation
 (or sometimes the score drl).

 Basically this happened: for a number of moves, it did the move, calculated
 the score and undo the move.
 One of those move was associated with a score -10hard/0soft, that was the
 best one.
 Now, it does that move (which is now called the step) and when it
 calculates the score it's a different score 0hard/0soft.

 Try TRACE environment and see if it crashes sooner. Copy paste your Move
 implementation here.


Using the TRACE environment gave the same results of DEBUG.

Here's my move implementation, as well as the snipet of drools rule file
that calculates the score based on remaining activities:

http://pastebin.mozilla.org/1355014


 In Planner 5.4 there will be 2 out-of-the-box Move implementations to use,
 so writing Move's become optional.

 Cool!

By the way, I'm using Drools 5.2.0 final.

Thanks,


 Op 13-10-11 16:37, Guilherme Kunigami schreef:

 Hi,

  I've implemented a very simple application using drools planner
 consisting of a bunch of activities. My rule file is very simple too and
 just counts the number of activities not assigned. When I run
 Solver.solve(), I get the following error message:

  Exception in thread AWT-EventQueue-0 java.lang.IllegalStateException:
 The presumedScore (-10hard/0soft) is corrupted because it is not the
 realScore  (0hard/0soft).

  Presumed workingMemory:
   Score rule (remainingActivitiesCount) has count (1) and weight total
 (11).
 Real workingMemory:
   Score rule (remainingActivitiesCount) has count (1) and weight total (0).

  I've tracked down this message and found this piece of code
 @DefaultLocalSearchSolver.solveImplementation():

   // there is no need to recalculate the score, but we still need to set
 it

 localSearchSolverScope.getWorkingSolution().setScore(localSearchStepScope.getScore());
 if (assertStepScoreIsUncorrupted) {

 localSearchSolverScope.assertWorkingScore(localSearchStepScope.getScore());
 }

  It seems that the working score is never updated along the algorithm, but
 the score in the working memory changes. Thus, when we use the DEBUG
 environment, assertStepScoreIsUncorrupted is turned on and the assertion
 fails.

  Should the score be updated or am I using the library incorrectly?

  Thanks,


 ___
 rules-users mailing 
 listrules-users@lists.jboss.orghttps://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users


 --
 With kind regards,
 Geoffrey De Smet


 ___
 rules-users mailing 
 listrules-users@lists.jboss.orghttps://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users


 --
 With kind regards,
 Geoffrey De Smet


 ___
 rules-users mailing list
 rules-users@lists.jboss.org
 https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users


___
rules-users mailing list
rules-users@lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users

Re: [rules-users] [planner] Problem setting configuration file

[Guilherme Kunigami]

Geoffrey,

Thank you, that worked!

I was wondering now if I can achieve the same with the drools rule file. The
method below wouldn't work because it's not me who load the file (I think
it's at AbstractSolverConfig.buildRuleBase, which seems to use
getResourceAsStream too).


2011/10/11 Geoffrey De Smet ge0ffrey.s...@gmail.com

 **
 Hi Guilharme,

 There's an overloaded method called configure(InputStream in) and
 configure(Reader reader)  too, use either of those instead:

 try {
   InputStream in = new FileInputStream(
 /path/to/xml/file/SolverConf.xml);
   configurer.configure(in);
 } finally {
   IOUtils.closeSilently(in);
 }

 Op 11-10-11 15:01, Guilherme Kunigami schreef:

 Hi,

  I'm trying to load a configuration file (namely SolverConf.xml) into
 XmlSolver with the code below:

  XmlSolverConfigurer configurer = new XmlSolverConfigurer();
 configurer.configure(SOLVER_CONFIG);
 Solver solver = configurer.buildSolver();

  If I bundle SolverConf.xml file with the application .jar file, then
 using SOLVER_CONFIG as /path/to/xml/file/SolverConf.xml works fine.

  But I want to use SolverConf.xml outside the .jar, so I can easiliy edit
 it, but I don't know what path should I pass to it.

  I know it's a Java related question, but I was wondering if anyone had a
 similar problem when configuring drools planner. (I've asked on
 stackoverflow, but none of the answers worked for me:
 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7718807/can-getresourceasstream-find-files-outside-the-jar-file
 )

  (Supposing my .jar is in /some/path and the SolverConf.xml will be on
 /some/path/conf for example)

  Thanks,



 ___
 rules-users mailing 
 listrules-users@lists.jboss.orghttps://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users


 --
 With kind regards,
 Geoffrey De Smet


 ___
 rules-users mailing list
 rules-users@lists.jboss.org
 https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users


___
rules-users mailing list
rules-users@lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users

[rules-users] [planner] The presumed score is corrupted

[Guilherme Kunigami]

Hi,

I've implemented a very simple application using drools planner consisting
of a bunch of activities. My rule file is very simple too and just counts
the number of activities not assigned. When I run Solver.solve(), I get the
following error message:

Exception in thread AWT-EventQueue-0 java.lang.IllegalStateException: The
presumedScore (-10hard/0soft) is corrupted because it is not the realScore
 (0hard/0soft).

Presumed workingMemory:
  Score rule (remainingActivitiesCount) has count (1) and weight total (11).
Real workingMemory:
  Score rule (remainingActivitiesCount) has count (1) and weight total (0).

I've tracked down this message and found this piece of code
@DefaultLocalSearchSolver.solveImplementation():

// there is no need to recalculate the score, but we still need to set it
localSearchSolverScope.getWorkingSolution().setScore(localSearchStepScope.getScore());
if (assertStepScoreIsUncorrupted) {

localSearchSolverScope.assertWorkingScore(localSearchStepScope.getScore());
}

It seems that the working score is never updated along the algorithm, but
the score in the working memory changes. Thus, when we use the DEBUG
environment, assertStepScoreIsUncorrupted is turned on and the assertion
fails.

Should the score be updated or am I using the library incorrectly?

Thanks,
___
rules-users mailing list
rules-users@lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users

[rules-users] [planner] Problem setting configuration file

[Guilherme Kunigami]

Hi,

I'm trying to load a configuration file (namely SolverConf.xml) into
XmlSolver with the code below:

XmlSolverConfigurer configurer = new XmlSolverConfigurer();
configurer.configure(SOLVER_CONFIG);
Solver solver = configurer.buildSolver();

If I bundle SolverConf.xml file with the application .jar file, then using
SOLVER_CONFIG as /path/to/xml/file/SolverConf.xml works fine.

But I want to use SolverConf.xml outside the .jar, so I can easiliy edit it,
but I don't know what path should I pass to it.

I know it's a Java related question, but I was wondering if anyone had a
similar problem when configuring drools planner. (I've asked on
stackoverflow, but none of the answers worked for me:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7718807/can-getresourceasstream-find-files-outside-the-jar-file
)

(Supposing my .jar is in /some/path and the SolverConf.xml will be on
/some/path/conf for example)

Thanks,
___
rules-users mailing list
rules-users@lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users