OSSolverService Input Parameters

At present, the OSSolverService takes the following parameters. The order of the parameters is irrelevant. Not all the parameters are required. However, if the solve or send service methods (see Section 10.3 ) are invoked a problem instance location must be specified.

-osil xxx.osil this is the name of the file that contains the optimization instance in OSiL format. It is assumed that this file is available in a directory on the machine that is running OSSolverService. If this option is not specified then the instance location must be specified in the OSoL solver options file.

-osol xxx.osol this is the name of the file that contains the solver options. It is assumed that this file is available in a directory on the machine that is running OSSolverService. It is not necessary to specify this option.

-osrl xxx.osrl this is the name of the file that contains the solver solution. A valid file path must be given on the machine that is running OSSolverService. It is not necessary to specify this option.

-serviceLocation url is the URL of the solver service. This is not required, and if not specified it is assumed that the problem is solved locally.

-serviceMethod methodName this is the method on the solver service to be invoked. The options are solve, send, kill, knock, getJobID, and retrieve. The use of these options is illustrated in the examples below. This option is not required, and the default value is solve.

-mps xxx.mps this is the name of the mps file if the problem instance is in mps format. It is assumed that this file is available in a directory on the machine that is running OSSolverService. The default file format is OSiL so this option is not required.

-nl xxx.nl this is the name of the AMPL nl file if the problem instance is in AMPL nl format. It is assumed that this file is available in a directory on the machine that is running OSSolverService. The default file format is OSiL so this option is not required.

-solver solverName Possible values for default OS installation are clp (COIN-OR Clp), cbc (COIN-OR Cbc), dylp (COIN-OR DyLP), and symphony (COIN-OR SYMPHONY). Other solvers supported (if the necessary libraries are present) are cplex (Cplex through COIN-OR Osi), glpk (glpk through COIN-OR Osi), ipopt (COIN-OR Ipopt), knitro (Knitro), and lindo (LINDO). If no value is specified for this parameter, then cbc is the default value of this parameter if the the solve or send service methods are used.

-browser browserName this paramater is a path to the browser on the local machine. If this optional parameter is specified then the solver result in OSrL format is transformed using XSLT into HTML and displayed in the browser.

-config pathToConfigureFile this parameter specifies a path on the local machine to a text file containing values for the input parameters. This is convenient for the user not wishing to constantly retype parameter values.

The input parameters to the OSSolverService may be given entirely in the command line or in a configuration file. We first illustrate giving all the parameters in the command line. The following command will invoke the Clp solver on the local machine to solve the problem instance parincLinear.osil. When invoking the commands below involving OSSolverService we assume that 1) the user is connected to the directory where the OSSolverService executable is located, and 2) that ../data/osilFiles is a valid path to COIN-OS/data/osilFiles. If the OS project was built successfully, then there is a copy of OSSolverService in COIN-OS/OS/src. The user may wish to execute OSSolverService from this src directory so that all that follows is correct in terms of path definitions.

./OSSolverService -solver clp -osil ../data/osilFiles/parincLinear.osil

Alternatively, these parameters can be put into a configuration file. Assume that the configuration file of interest is testlocalclp.config. It would contain the two lines of information

-osil ../data/osilFiles/parincLinear.osil
-solver clp

Then the command line is

./OSSolverService -config ../data/configFiles/testlocalclp.config

Some Rules:

1.

When using the send() or solve() methods a problem instance file location must be specified either at the command line, in the configuration file, or in the <instanceLocation> element in the OSoL options file file.

2.

The default serviceMethod is solve if another service method is not specified. The service method cannot be specified in the OSoL options file.

3.

If the solver option is not specified, the COIN-OR solver Cbc is the default solver used. In this case an error is thrown if the problem instance has quadratic or other nonlinear terms.

4.

If the options send, kill, knock, getJobID, or retrieve are specified, a serviceLocation must be specified.

Parameters specified in the configure file are overridden by parameters specified at the command line. This is convenient if a user has a base configure file and wishes to override only a few options. For example,

./OSSolverService -config ../data/configFiles/testlocalclp.config -solver lindo

or

./OSSolverService -solver lindo -config ../data/configFiles/testlocalclp.config

will result in the LINDO solver being used even though Clp is specified in the testlocalclp configure file.