Chapter 9. The OptaPlanner SolverManager

A SolverManager is a facade for one or more Solver instances to simplify solving planning problems in REST and other enterprise services.

Unlike the Solver.solve(…​) method, a SolverManager has the following characteristics:

Internally, a SolverManager manages a thread pool of solver threads, which call Solver.solve(…​), and a thread pool of consumer threads, which handle best solution changed events.

In Quarkus and Spring Boot, the SolverManager instance is automatically injected in your code. If you are using a platform other than Quarkus or Spring Boot, build a SolverManager instance with the create(…​) method:

SolverConfig solverConfig = SolverConfig.createFromXmlResource(".../cloudBalancingSolverConfig.xml");
SolverManager<CloudBalance, UUID> solverManager = SolverManager.create(solverConfig, new SolverManagerConfig());

SolverConfig solverConfig = SolverConfig.createFromXmlResource(".../cloudBalancingSolverConfig.xml");
SolverManager<CloudBalance, UUID> solverManager = SolverManager.create(solverConfig, new SolverManagerConfig());

Each problem submitted to the SolverManager.solve(…​) methods must have a unique problem ID. Later calls to getSolverStatus(problemId) or terminateEarly(problemId) use that problem ID to distinguish between planning problems. The problem ID must be an immutable class, such as Long, String, or java.util.UUID.

The SolverManagerConfig class has a parallelSolverCount property that controls how many solvers are run in parallel. For example, if the parallelSolverCount property` is set to 4 and you submit five problems, four problems start solving immediately and the fifth problem starts when one of the first problems ends. If those problems solve for five minutes each, the fifth problem takes 10 minutes to finish. By default, parallelSolverCount is set to AUTO, which resolves to half the CPU cores, regardless of the moveThreadCount of the solvers.

To retrieve the best solution, after solving terminates normally use SolverJob.getFinalBestSolution():

CloudBalance problem1 = ...;
UUID problemId = UUID.randomUUID();
// Returns immediately
SolverJob<CloudBalance, UUID> solverJob = solverManager.solve(problemId, problem1);
...
CloudBalance solution1;
try {
    // Returns only after solving terminates
    solution1 = solverJob.getFinalBestSolution();
} catch (InterruptedException | ExecutionException e) {
    throw ...;
}

CloudBalance problem1 = ...;
UUID problemId = UUID.randomUUID();
// Returns immediately
SolverJob<CloudBalance, UUID> solverJob = solverManager.solve(problemId, problem1);
...
CloudBalance solution1;
try {
    // Returns only after solving terminates
    solution1 = solverJob.getFinalBestSolution();
} catch (InterruptedException | ExecutionException e) {
    throw ...;
}

However, there are better approaches, both for solving batch problems before a user needs the solution as well as for live solving while a user is actively waiting for the solution.

The current SolverManager implementation runs on a single computer node, but future work aims to distribute solver loads across a cloud.

public class TimeTableService {

    private SolverManager<TimeTable, Long> solverManager;

    // Returns immediately, call it for every data set
    public void solveBatch(Long timeTableId) {
        solverManager.solve(timeTableId,
                // Called once, when solving starts
                this::findById,
                // Called once, when solving ends
                this::save);
    }

    public TimeTable findById(Long timeTableId) {...}

    public void save(TimeTable timeTable) {...}

}

public class TimeTableService {

    private SolverManager<TimeTable, Long> solverManager;

    // Returns immediately, call it for every data set
    public void solveBatch(Long timeTableId) {
        solverManager.solve(timeTableId,
                // Called once, when solving starts
                this::findById,
                // Called once, when solving ends
                this::save);
    }

    public TimeTable findById(Long timeTableId) {...}

    public void save(TimeTable timeTable) {...}

}