Ask HN: Do you use an optimization solver? Which one? Do you like it?
I would love to use one or more but the process to convert business logic to solver is painful so I ended up having to write a simulated annealing algo in Rust instead. I tried solver.com, Google OR-Tools, and a few other utilities.<p>It was much easier to build a score-calculator for min&#x2F;max based on user-tweaked parameters, then, jiggle the data, re-calculate score, and keep doing it until there was significant improvement (again, standard SA). I would absolutely love to convert the entire production plan logic with material availability, lead-times, customer demand, quality control windows etc. to something like nextmv.io but looking at your docs, I have no idea where to begin.<p>Cost is a big factor too because 3 years ago I bought 4 old 24-core Xeons off eBay and they&#x27;ve been chugging non-stop simulating billion+ flops per hour with electricity being the only cost. I don&#x27;t mind paying $50-100&#x2F;day for cloud if the results are great and code is easy to manage. We have the same chicken-egg problem everyone in supply chain currently has - we don&#x27;t have enough materials to make everything, don&#x27;t know when we&#x27;ll get everything, and so don&#x27;t know the best order to buy&#x2F;make everything in. I would love to write a solver for this using our dataset but I kind of don&#x27;t want to re-invent the wheel.<p>As it stands, every solver I find is one layer of abstraction away from what I want to code in. I can explain the problem in length if you want but it&#x27;s honestly nothing unique - just the standard MRP&#x2F;ERP planning with ton of BOM items, PO delays, labor&#x2F;machine capacity constraints etc.<p>Your existing tutorials explain how I can use your API&#x2F;SDK to perform OR operations. That&#x27;s great and a necessity. However, it&#x27;s not sufficient for me because my questions are: How do I represent my production calendar in the JSON blob for your algo? How do I put a constraint of 100hrs&#x2F;week&#x2F;machine but also 168hrs&#x2F;week&#x2F;room full of specific machines. In other words, while each machine can run 100hrs&#x2F;week, if there are 4 of them in the same room, only one can run at a time, and so combined machines in a given room cannot be over 168hrs&#x2F;week. Maybe a tutorial or a higher-level library to help people like me convert business rules into JSON format for your APIs. Because even if I might be capable of using your API as-is, I unfortunately don&#x27;t have the time to implement these things myself. Hope this makes sense and gives you some insight into at least one of your target use-cases.