Optimization Services Standards/Protocols - OSP

Optimization Services (OS) is a unified framework for the new generation distributed optimization systems, mainly optimization over the Internet. It is regarded as the Operations Research Internet. The corresponding Optimization Services Protocol (OSP) is a set of industrial standards for optimization problem representations and software/service invocation.

OSP is an application level networking protocol that includes over 20 sub-protocols of Optimization Services x Languages (OSxL). Optimization within a local environment is treated as a special case; issues within a local environment are mostly addressed under the distributed case.

Although large-scale optimization has been under research for over half a century now, the challenge of making it useful in practice has continued to the present day. Initially, the greatest difficulties were posed by solution computation and model building, but the primary impediment to broader use of optimization models and methods today is now more of communication. Currently there exists an abundance of optimization solvers and other supporting tools, various formats to represent optimization problems, and heterogeneous mechanisms to communicate with optimization components. Moreover different optimization components are implemented in different programming and modeling languages and located on different platforms locally or over the network. Even if a prospective user is not puzzled by such a plethora of combinations, the trouble of obtaining, installing, and configuring the software does not justify the benefits from using it.

Through standardization of representation, communication, discovery and registration, the OS framework provides an open infrastructure for all optimization system components including modeling language environments, servers, registries, communication agents, interfaces, analyzers, solvers and simulations. The goal is that all the algorithmic codes are implemented as services under this framework and customers use these computational services similar to daily utility services. Optimization Services also facilitates a healthier development environment for research and development in the general area of Operations Research and Management Sciences.