A Visual Web Tool to Perform What-If Analysis of Optimization Approaches
This provides a tool for Operation Research practitioners to visualize results and guide research, but it is incremental as it builds on existing performance profile methods.
The paper tackles the need for practical evaluation in optimization by introducing a web tool that constructs performance profiles and enables what-if analysis to estimate solver improvements, demonstrated on Constraint Programming and Mixed Integer Linear Programming.
In Operation Research, practical evaluation is essential to validate the efficacy of optimization approaches. This paper promotes the usage of performance profiles as a standard practice to visualize and analyze experimental results. It introduces a Web tool to construct and export performance profiles as SVG or HTML files. In addition, the application relies on a methodology to estimate the benefit of hypothetical solver improvements. Therefore, the tool allows one to employ what-if analysis to screen possible research directions, and identify those having the best potential. The approach is showcased on two Operation Research technologies: Constraint Programming and Mixed Integer Linear Programming.