# Semantic Typing: When Is It Not Enough To Say That X Is Integer?

Andre Cire, John Hooker, and I recently finished a paper on an interesting, and somewhat controversial, topic that relates to high-level modeling of optimization problems. The paper is entitled “Modeling with Metaconstraints and Semantic Typing of Variables“, and its current version can be downloaded from here.

Here’s the abstract:

Recent research in the area of hybrid optimization shows that the right combination of different technologies, which exploits their complementary strengths, simplifies modeling and speeds up computation significantly. A substantial share of these computational gains comes from better communicating problem structure to solvers. Metaconstraints, which can be simple (e.g. linear) or complex (e.g. global) constraints endowed with extra behavioral parameters, allow for such richer representation of problem structure. They do, nevertheless, come with their own share of complicating issues, one of which is the identification of relationships between auxiliary variables of distinct constraint relaxations. We propose the use of additional semantic information in the declaration of decision variables as a generic solution to this issue. We present a series of examples to illustrate our ideas over a wide variety of applications.

Optimization models typically declare a variable by giving it a name and a canonical type, such as real, integer, binary, or string. However, stating that variable $x$ is integer does not indicate whether that integer is the ID of a machine, the start time of an operation, or a production quantity. In other words, variable declarations say little about what the variable means. In the paper, we argue that giving a more specific meaning to variables through semantic typing can be beneficial for a number of reasons. For example, let’s say you need an integer variable $x_j$ to represent the machine assigned to job $j$. Instead of writing something like this in your modeling language (e.g. AMPL):

var x{j in jobs} integer;

it would be beneficial to have a language that allows you to write something like this

x[j] is which machine assign(job j);

To see why, take a look at the paper ;-)

Leave a comment

Filed under Modeling, Research