Adjumo

Allocating Debate Judges Using Mathematical Optimization

General information

• A demo of the interface (excluding the allocations solver) is available here.
• A report describing challenges involved in using the system at WUDC 2016 is available here.

Getting started

Julia & Julia Packages

You need to install Julia, and then install a bunch of Julia packages. Julia downloads are at http://julialang.org/downloads/. Download and install the latest stable version, which is currently 0.4.2.

To install the required packages, run:

julia julia/installrequirements.jl [gurobi] [cbc] [glpk] [psql]

If you're not familiar with optimisation solvers, read the below material on the solver libraries first!

With no arguments, it will install CBC.jl and GLPKMathProgInterface.jl, but not Gurobi.jl or PostgresQL.jl. If any solver (gurobi, cbc, glpk) is specified, it will install only those specified. It will only install PostgreSQL.jl if psql is specified. The order of arguments does not matter.

To see what this installs, inspect installrequirements.jl (it's a simple enough file).

Solvers

There are three options: Gurobi, CBC and GLPK. You only need one of them.

Option 1: Gurobi. Gurobi is a commercial optimization solver. You need a license to use it. If you can get hold of a Gurobi license:

Pkg.add("Gurobi")

Note: This will fail if you don't have Gurobi installed.

If you want to use Gurobi Cloud, you need a fork of this repository, since the official one doesn't yet support Gurobi Cloud:

Pkg.clone("https://github.com/czlee/Gurobi.jl.git")

If you can't get a Gurobi license, then we can use one of the open-source solvers, CBC or GLPK.

Option 2: CBC. To install CBC:

Pkg.add("Cbc")

This will take a while and you'll see lots of gibberish printed on the screen. You need a C compiler, a C++ compiler and Make installed in order to build CBC. If you get error messages complaining about the lack of any of them, exit Julia and run these from the shell:

sudo apt-get install gcc
sudo apt-get install g++
sudo apt-get install make

Then try again.

Option 3: GLPK. To install GLPK, first install the libgmp-dev package, from the shell (outside Julia):

sudo apt-get install libgmp-dev

Then install in Julia:

Pkg.add("GLPKMathProgInterface")

User Interface

Dependencies

• Node.js
• Bower

Frontend Setup

• cd frontend
• npm install
• bower install
• ember serve --proxy http://0.0.0.0:3000 (open http://localhost:4200/ to confirm it's working)

Note: the front end requires that there are json files present in public/data to be imported

Backend Setup

• cd backend
• npm install
• npm start (open http://0.0.0.0:3000/ to confirm it's working)

Usage

• To start the server: ember serve --proxy http://0.0.0.0:3000 --environment="production" --live-reload false
• Open http://localhost:4200

Running

Julia part only

The file that runs the allocations the Julia part is called allocate.jl and can be run directly from the shell:

julia allocate.jl

This generates random data for a pretend round and runs the algorithm on it. You can run it with a different number of debates, or pretend the current round is something else. For example, to run it with a round comprising 10 debates, pretending it is currently round 3:

julia allocate.jl -n 10 -r 3

If you installed more than one of the solvers above, you can choose which one to use with --solver. For example, to use GLPK:

julia allocate.jl --solver glpk

The other options are cbc and gurobi. If you don't specify, it'll try Gurobi, then CBC if Gurobi isn't installed, then GLPK if neither of the other two are installed.

For more options:

julia allocate.jl --help

Documentation

Requires ruby, and running:

  gem install github-pages

Then check out the gh-pages branch and run:

  jekyll s