I'm trying to solve a SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) sequencing problem on the production line in the company I work for.
In this problem, I have in average 2000 sku's to be sequenced in a single equipment. This equipment is released for production for 600 minutes per day. The time the sku will use will vary (production time + equipment setup time).
I am having difficulty analyzing the setup time of the equipment, since I need to check the original sku and what will be the next sku that will be producing.
Is there any way to analyze the step solver? Or is there any other way to analyze my equipment setup time?
We already tried to use Shadow Variable, but the performance was very low. Making the solution unfeasible.
If you turn on DEBUG logging, you'll see every step. If you turn on TRACE logging, you'll see every move evaluation too.
Generally, all this is too verbose, and the optaplanner-benchmark tool is a much better approach, as it has several statistics (most of which need to be turned on explicitly) to give insight as to what's going on.
Related
Firstly, I would like to apologise for the detailed problem statement. Being a novice, I couldn't express it in any lesser words.
Environment Setup Details:
To give some background, I work in a cloud company where we have multiple servers geographically located in all continents. So, we have hierarchy like this:
Several partitions
Each partition has 7 pop's
Each pop has multiple nodes all set up with redundancy.
Turn servers connecting traffic to each node depending on the client location
Actual clients-ios, android, mac, windows,etc.
Now, every time the user uses our product/service, he leaves a rating out of 5, 5 being outstanding. This data is stored in our databases and we mine it and analyse it to pin-point the exact issue on any particular day.
For example, if the users from Asia are giving more bad ratings on Tuesday this week than a usual Tuesday, what factors can cause this - is it something to do with clients app version, or server release , physical factors, loss, increased round trip delay etc.
What we have done:
Till now we have been using visualization tools to track each of these metrics separately per day to see the trends and detect the issues manually.
But, due to growing micr-services, it is becoming difficult day by day. Now, we want to automate it using python/pandas.
What I want to do:
If the ratings drop on a particular day/hour, I run the script and it should do all the manual work by taking all the permutations and combinations of all factors and list out the exact combinations which could have lead to the drop.
The second step would be to check whether the drop was significant due to varying number of ratings.
What I know:
I understand that I can do this using pandas by creating a dataframe for each predictor variable and trying to do it per variable.
And then I can apply tests like whitney test etc for ordinal data.
What I need help with:
But I just wanted to know if there is a better way to do it? It is perfectly fine if there is a learning curve involved. I can learn and do it. I just wanted some help in choosing the right approach for this.
In "look up metrics” I’m trying to know how my players improve in playing my game.
I have the score (both as desing event and progression, just to try) and in look up metrics I try to “filter” with session number or days since install but, even if I group by Dimension, this doesn’t produce any result.
For instance if I do the same but with device filter it shows me the right histogram with score's mean per device.
What am I doing wrong?
From the customer care:
The session filter works only on core metrics at this point (like DAU). We hope to make this filter compatible with custom metrics as well but this might take time as we first need to include this improvement to our roadmap and then evaluate it by comparing it with our other tasks. As a result, there is no ETA on making a release.
I would recommend you to download the raw data (go to "Export data" in the settings of the game) and perform an analysis on your own for this sort of "per user" analysis. You should be able to create stats per user. GA does not do this since your game can reach millions of users and there's no way you can plot this amount of entries in a browser.
I have a GTFS feed defined for my fleet. This tells the routes, trips and timings. Now using this GTFS feed, is it possible to optimize the utilization of my fleet's vehicles? Can I schedule the vehicles such that once it completes a trip, it can be assigned to serve a trip of another route?
I have constriants such as no vehicle should be running more than 12 hours, every vehicle will undergo a health check for 2 hrs, etc.
To me this sounds like a case of the Knapsack problem.
If such a project exists, kindly let me know. Is there an algorithm that can solve this problem?
Thanks,
Yash
You're asking a question that is typically assigned to a scheduling system, one which would produce GTFS files from the get-go. In smaller systems, this actually is not difficult to do, but as the number of routes (or "trip patterns") increases, the process gets more complex.
Before you undertake any project like this, I suggest reading over the TCRP manual on scheduling, paying close attention to the terms "cycle time," "headway," and "interlining."
While I'd love to help more, I don't have time right now to get into the specifics. I performed a similar analysis with automatically collected cycle times on a limited set of routes in my masters thesis, starting on page 118.
I hope this helps. If you have any follow-up questions, post a comment and I'll respond when I have time.
Lets say I am going to run process X and see how long it takes.
I am going to save into a database a date I ran this process, and the time it took. I want to know what to put into the DB.
Process X almost always runs under 1500ms, so this is a short process. It usually runs between 500 and 1500ms, quite a range (3x difference).
My question is, how many "runs" should be saved into the DB as a single run?
Every run saved into the DB as its
own row?
5 Runs, averaged, then save that
time?
10 Runs averaged?
20 Runs, remove anything more than 2
std deviations away, and save
everything inside that range?
Does anyone have any good info backing them up on this?
Save the data for every run into its own row. Then later you can use and analyze the data however you like... ie, all you the other options you listed can be performed after the fact. It's not really possible for someone else to draw meaningful conclusions about how to average/analyze the data without knowing more about what's going on.
The fastest run is the one that most accurately times only your code.
All slower runs are slower because of noise introduced by the operating system scheduler.
The variance you experience is going to differ from machine to machine, and even on identical machines, the set of runnable processes will introduce noise.
None of the above. Bran is close though. You should save every measurment. But don't average them. The average (arithmetic mean) can be very misleading in this type of analysis. The reason is that some of your measurments will be much longer than the others. This will happen becuse things can interfere with your process - even on 'clean' test systems. It can also happen becuse your process may not be as deterministic as you might thing.
Some people think that simply taking more samples (running more iterations) and averaging the measurmetns will give them better data. It doesn't. The more you run, the more likelty it is that you will encounter a perturbing event, thus making the average overly high.
A better way to do this is to run as many measurments as you can (time permitting). 100 is not a bad number, but 30-ish can be enough.
Then, sort these by magnitude and graph them. Note that this is not a standard distribution. Compute compute some simple statistics: mean, median, min, max, lower quaertile, upper quartile.
Contrary to some guidance, do not 'throw away' outside vaulues or 'outliers'. These are often the most intersting measurments. For example, you may establish a nice baseline, then look for departures. Understanding these departures will help you fully understand how your process works, how the sytsem affecdts your process, and what can interfere with your process. It will often readily expose bugs.
Depends what kind of data you want. I'd say one line per run initially, then analyze the data, go from there. Maybe store a min/max/average of X runs if you want to consolidate it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size
Bryan is right - you need to investigate more. if your code has that much variance even "most" of the time then you might have a lot of fluctuation in your test environment because of other processes, os paging or other factors. If not it seems that you have code paths doing wildly varying amount of work and coming up with a single number/run data to describe the performance of such a multi-modal system is not going to tell you much. So i'd say isolate your setup as much as possible, run at least 30 trials and get a feel for what your performance curve looks like. Once you have that, you can use that wikipedia page to come up with a number that will tell you how many trials you need to run per code-change to see if the performance has increased/decreased with some level of statistical significance.
While saying, "Save every run," is nice, it might not be practical in your case. However, I do think that storing only the average eliminates too much data. I like storing the average of ten runs, but instead of storing just the average, I'd also store the max and min values, so that I can get a feel for the spread of the data in addition to its center.
The max and min information in particular will tell you how often corner cases arise. Is the 1500ms case a one-in-1000 outlier? Or is it something that recurs on a regular basis?
I am making a BI system for a bank-like institution. This system should manage credit contracts, invoices, payments, penalties and interest.
Now, I need to make a method that builds an invoice. I have to calculate how much the customer has to pay right now. He has a debt, which he has to pay for. He also has to pay for the interest. If he was ever late with due payment, penalties are applied for each day he's late.
I thought there were 2 ways of doing this:
By having only 1 original state - the contract's original state. And each time to compute the monthly payment which the customer has to make, consider the actual, made payments.
By constantly making intermediary states, going from the last intermediary state, and considering only the events that took place between the time of these 2 intermediary states. This means having a job that performs periodically (daily, monthly), that takes the last saved state, apply the changes (due payments, actual payments, changes in global constans like the penalty rate which is controlled by the Central Bank), and save the resulting state.
The benefits of the first variant:
Always actual. If changes were made with a date from the past (a guy came with a paid invoice 5 days after he made the payment to the bank), they will be correctly reflected in the results.
The flaws of the first variant:
Takes long to compute
Documents printed with the current results may differ if the correct data changes due to operations entered with a back date.
The benefits of the second variant:
Works fast, and aggregated data is always available for search and reports.
Simpler to compute
The flaws of the second variant:
Vulnerable to failed jobs.
Errors in the past propagate until the end, to the final results.
An intermediary result cannot be changed if new data from past transactions arrives (it can, but it's hard, and with many implications, so I'd rather mark it as Tabu)
Jobs cannot be performed successfully and without problems if an unfinished transaction exists (an issued invoice that wasn't yet paid)
Is there any other way? Can I combine the benefits from these two? Which one is used in other similar systems you've encountered? Please share any experience.
Problems of this nature are always more complicated than they first appear. This
is a consequence of what I like to call the Rumsfeldian problem of the unknown unknown.
Basically, whatever you do now, be prepared to make adjustments for arbitrary future rules.
This is a tough proposition. some future possibilities that may have a significant impact on
your calculation model are back dated payments, adjustments and charges.
Forgiven interest periods may also become an issue (particularly if back dated). Requirements
to provide various point-in-time (PIT) calculations based on either what was "known" at
that PIT (past view of the past) or taking into account transactions occurring after the reference PIT that
were back dated to a PIT before the reference (current view of the past). Calculations of this nature can be
a real pain in the head.
My advice would be to calculate from "scratch" (ie. first variant). Implement optimizations (eg. second variant) only
when necessary to meet performance constraints. Doing calculations from the beginning is a compute intensive
model but is generally more flexible with respect to accommodating unexpected left turns.
If performance is a problem but the frequency of complicating factors (eg. back dated transactions)
is relatively low you could explore a hybrid model employing the best of both variants. Here you store the
current state and calculate forward
using only those transactions that posted since the last stored state to create a new current state. If you hit a
"complication" re-do the entire account from the
beginning to reestablish the current state.
Being able to accommodate the unexpected without triggering a re-write is probably more important in the long run
than shaving calculation time right now. Do not place restrictions on your computation model until you have to. Saving
current state often brings with it a number of built in assumptions and restrictions that reduce wiggle room for
accommodating future requirements.