Xpress Insight 5is the technology component of Xpress Optimization that allows you to rapidly configure business applications to operationalize your analytic and optimization models. It provides a Compute capability that enables remote execution of Xpress Solver and Xpress Mosel. It is built on an industry-standard architecture that is scalable, secure and resilient.
FICO Xpress Insight 5.3 is now generally available for all clients and prospects. It adds support for interactive Insight applications which provide user-friendly interfaces that allow users to visualize and collaborate on improved business decisions.
Compared to the Xpress Insight 4 tech stack, it allows users to send custom progress information during model execution and display this information in the views using our mark-up language VDL. Even more, with this feature a model execution can be gracefully interrupted, e.g., with the best solution found so far.
Insight always provided the ability to configure (optimization) models, run them against different input data and visually compare the results. There has been an increased adoption of this functionality to non-optimization models, like predictive models as well business rules. We refer to the use of Insight without optimization as Simulation. Due to Insights configurability and visualization functionality, the results can be represented in business terms – which is called Business Outcome Simulation.
This release makes connecting to FICO’s business rules technology (Decision Modeler and Blaze) easier and provides UI components to quickly build simulation UIs.
Key features include:
Certainly, Xpress Insight 5 marks a milestone with deep architectural enhancements to suit scalability w.r.t. number of users and compute loads, and security needs on the one hand, and a rich variety of business user features such as custom progress reporting. We recommend reading the Insight 5 release notes for more details and several other enhancements.
FICO Xpress Insight 5.3 is now generally available for all clients and prospects. It adds support for interactive Insight applications which provide user-friendly interfaces that allow users to visualize and collaborate on improved business decisions.
Compared to the Xpress Insight 4 tech stack, it allows users to send custom progress information during model execution and display this information in the views using our mark-up language VDL. Even more, with this feature a model execution can be gracefully interrupted, e.g., with the best solution found so far.
Insight always provided the ability to configure (optimization) models, run them against different input data and visually compare the results. There has been an increased adoption of this functionality to non-optimization models, like predictive models as well business rules. We refer to the use of Insight without optimization as Simulation. Due to Insights configurability and visualization functionality, the results can be represented in business terms – which is called Business Outcome Simulation.
This release makes connecting to FICO’s business rules technology (Decision Modeler and Blaze) easier and provides UI components to quickly build simulation UIs.
Key features include:
- Custom Progress Reporting for Mosel and Python based Insight apps:
- Developers can display progress information in Insight apps of a running model written in Mosel or Python. Be it business KPIs or information about the solving progress, the views can be configured in VDL or with VDL expressions using View Designer. No JavaScript or html is required.
- This feature is particularly friendly to Data Scientists and Operations Researchers where the progress information is maintained fully in the model entities. The model actively sends progress updates to the views, and queries for messages from the views on demand.
- A custom text message can be send from the view to the model using VDL actions.
- A queued or running job can be cancelled or interrupted using VDL Actions.
- VDL components automatically turn into read only mode when a scenario is not editable which can be optionally be re-enabled.
- With Insight 5, the examples and documentation as well as the Xpress Insight modelling binaries are shipped in a separate Insight 5 developer kit. This facilitates distribution and enables users to easily get the necessary binaries for local development, and access to examples and docs without installing the software.
- Simulation as an Insight feature:
- This release ships with a Python/Insight app demonstrating a set of efficient connectors for simulation of decision rules by connecting to Blaze or Decision Modeler workspaces. It further demonstrates the use of VDL Actions for dynamic filtering and aggregation in a distribution chart.
- The connectors can use JSON and XML input, and are able to use workspaces with uncommitted changes exported from DM.
- The audit and change logs are supported in JSON formats.
- When the model does not declare the number of threads per execution mode, this unspecified value now defaults to one. Hence, if thread based scheduling is enabled on the workers, such execution modes will no longer block the worker and not consume the remaining threads available, but consume deterministically a single thread.
- The Project framework available on GitHub which has been adopted by several clients has been upgraded to support Insight 5’s REST API. In the JS API, a method to open an import dialog has been added.
- Migration from v4 to v5:
- With the new tech stack, some changes have been made and users interested to upgrade from Insight 4 to Insight 5 are recommended to read the section about migration in the Insight 5 developer guide.
- Support for Tableau based views is planned for the upcoming releases.
- The Dashboard framework from GitHub is not yet supported.
Certainly, Xpress Insight 5 marks a milestone with deep architectural enhancements to suit scalability w.r.t. number of users and compute loads, and security needs on the one hand, and a rich variety of business user features such as custom progress reporting. We recommend reading the Insight 5 release notes for more details and several other enhancements.
Updated 4 years ago
Version 3.0