OPL models | IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service

OPL models

You can build OPL models in the Decision Optimization experiment UI in Cloud Pak for Data as a Service.

In this section:

Inputs and Outputs
Engine settings

To create an OPL model in the experiment UI, select Create > OPL in the model selection window. You can also import OPL models from a file or import a scenario .zip file that contains the OPL model and the data. If you import from a file or scenario .zip file, the data must be in .csv format. However, you can import other file formats that you have as project assets into the experiment UI. You can also import data sets including connected data into your project from the model builder in the Prepare data view.

Inputs and Outputs

In an OPL model you must declare a tupleset, for each table that you imported in the Prepare data view using the same names. The schema for each tupleset must have same number of columns as the table and use the same field names. For example, if you have an input table in your Prepare data view called Product with the attributes name, demand, insideCost, and outsideCost, your OPL model must contain the following definition:

tuple TProduct {
   key string name;
   float demand;
   float insideCost;
   float outsideCost;
 };

{TProduct}     Product = ...;

Similarly if you want to display a table in the Explore solution view, you must define a tupleset for this output table in your OPL model. For example, this code produces an output table with 3 columns in the solution.

/// solution
 tuple TPlannedProduction {
   key string productId;
   float insideProduction;
   float outsideProduction;
 }

You can find this example OPL model for a pasta production problem in the Model_Builder folder of the DO-samples. You can download and extract all the samples. Select the relevant product and version subfolder.

Engine settings

You can add an OPL parameter settings (.ops) file in your Decision Optimization experiment. An OPL settings file is where you store user-defined values of OPL options for mathematical programming, or constraint programming, and for the OPL language. It gives you access to the solver (engine) parameters so that you can modify them.

Click + and select Add engine settings in the Build model view. The Visual editor opens and displays different categories of parameters with their default values, which you can customize for your model. You can also search for specific parameters by entering a name in the Find settings search field. OPL Engine settings .ops file shown open in Visual Editor view with one customized parameter

In this window, you can select different parameters or edit fields. If you modify the default parameters, a Customized Settings pane that lists your changes.

You can toggle the Visual editor switch to the off position to view your changes in an XML editor. The file, when displayed in the XML editor, only contains the parameters that you changed, and does not list all the default parameters. You can also edit the parameters in this XML editor and your changes will be displayed in the Visual editor when you toggle the switch back to the on position. XML editor showing modifications made to default engine setting parameters

You can import an .ops file to use for your engine settings, but you can only have one engine settings file for your model. Importing such a file can be useful if you have some non-default parameters that you have specified in IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio that you want to import into your experiment.

For more information about the OPL language and engine parameters, see: