Session Title
Hexaly/Artelys
Topic
Technology Showcase
Co-Topic 1
Technology Showcase
Co-Topic 2
Technology Showcase

Hexaly, a New Kind of Global Optimization Solver

10:45 AM - 11:20 AM
Fred Gardi, Hexaly.
Hexaly is a new kind of global optimization solver. Its modeling interface is nonlinear and set-oriented. It also supports user-coded functions, thus enabling black-box optimization and, more particularly, simulation optimization. In a sense, Hexaly APIs unify modeling concepts from mixed-linear programming, nonlinear programming, and constraint programming. Under the hood, Hexaly combines various exact and heuristic optimization methods: spatial branch-and-bound, simplex methods, interior-point methods, augmented Lagrangian methods, automatic Dantzig-Wolfe reformulation, column and row generation, propagation methods, local search, direct search, population-based methods, and surrogate modeling techniques for black-box optimization.

Regarding performance benchmarks, Hexaly distinguishes itself against the leading solvers in the market, like Gurobi, IBM Cplex, and Google OR Tools, by delivering fast and scalable solutions to problems in the space of Supply Chain and Workforce Management like Routing, Scheduling, Packing, Clustering, Matching, Assignment, and Location problems. For example, on notoriously hard problems like the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows or Flexible Job Shop Scheduling with Setup Times, Hexaly delivers solutions with a gap to the best solutions known in the literature smaller than 1% in a few minutes of running times on a basic computer.

In addition to the Optimizer, we provide an innovative development platform called Hexaly Studio to model and solve rich Vehicle Routing and Job Shop Scheduling problems in a no-code fashion. The user can define its problem and data, run the Optimizer, visualize the solutions and key metrics through dashboards, and deploy the resulting app in the cloud – without coding.