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Efficient large-scale configuration via integer linear programming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2013

Ingo Feinerer
Ingo Feinerer*
Affiliation:
Institute of Information Systems, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria
*
Reprint requests to: Ingo Feinerer, Institute of Information Systems, Vienna University of Technology, Favoritenstraße 9, A-1040 Wien, Austria. E-mail: ingo.feinerer@tuwien.ac.at
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Abstract

Configuration of large-scale applications in an engineering context requires a modeling environment that allows the design engineer to draft the configuration problem in a natural way and efficient methods that can process the modeled setting and scale with the number of components. Existing configuration methods in artificial intelligence typically perform quite well in certain subareas but are hard to use for general-purpose modeling without mathematical or logics background (the so-called knowledge acquisition bottleneck) and/or have scalability issues. As a remedy to this important issue both in theory and in practical applications, we use a standard modeling environment like the Unified Modeling Language that has been proposed by the configuration community as a suitable object-oriented formalism for configuration problems. We provide a translation of key concepts of class diagrams to inequalities and identify relevant configuration aspects and show how they are treated as an integer linear program. Solving an integer linear program can be done efficiently, and integer linear programming scales well to large configurations consisting of several thousands components and interactions. We conduct an empirical study in the context of package management for operating systems and for the Linux kernel configuration. We evaluate our methodology by a benchmark and obtain convincing results in support for using integer linear programming for configuration applications of realistic size and complexity.

Keywords

ConfigurationInteger Linear ProgrammingLinux Kernel ConfigurationPackage ManagementUnified Modeling Language
Type
Regular Articles
Information
AI EDAM , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , February 2013 , pp. 37 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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