Data management is the most cumbersome and time consuming task for an Operational Research expert. Connecting an optimization model to data and modifying the data can take up to 80% of a data scientist’s worktime! This is a big issue, especially now that access to data-science libraries is so easy.
To address this issue and free up the time of such specialists, we created a small light API – called doopl – to embed OPL models in the Python ecosystem.
With very few lines of code, you now have the ability to easily use pythonic data structures to read and write tabular data with OPL.
It also simplifies a lot optimization workflows that require multiple solves with data changes.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of data management possibilities:
- CSV/Excel files and SQLite databases with Pandas.
- SQLAlchemy connection to handle databases.
- Tuple lists coming from a forecast done with scikit-learn or any ML library.
A first version is now available on pypi and conda for windows 64 bits, Mac OS and Linux 64.
It requires Python 2.7, 3.5 or 3.6
It is completely free and can be installed in 1 command line.
You can find examples showing all the capabilities of the library on github: doopl-examples
It will work with a CPLEX Studio 12.8 installation.
This installation can be a commercial edition, a free edition (Community Edition) or a free academic edition.
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