Initializing help system before first use

Introduction to the FICO Xpress Insight 5 Installation Guide

Xpress Insight is a platform for deploying rich interactive optimization apps. FICO® Xpress Insight 5 and later extends the platform capabilities with a job execution service implemented by the Compute Interface app and API.

This introduction provides an overview of the options that are available in Xpress Insight 5 to enable you to select which features to install.

FICO® Xpress is a pre-requisite of FICO® Xpress Insight 5. Xpress provides access to optimization algorithms and technologies used to solve linear, mixed integer and non-linear problems. Before you begin, ensure that you have the correct version of Xpress for the version of Xpress Insight that you are installing.

Xpress Insight 5.0 uses Xpress 8.11.

The platform comprises three main building blocks:
  • Users interact with the platform via a browser-based web interface on their local machine, accessing the Xpress Insight Server over http or https.
  • The core of the system is the Xpress Insight Server which may be installed on the same local machine as the web client or on a remote server, depending on the system configuration.
  • Finally, computational effort is offloaded to one or more execution workers. An execution worker may be co-located with the server. However, for production deployments, it is recommended that execution workers be installed on separate servers.

Users can submit a compute job using the Xpress software such as the Optimizer Console, Optimizer libraries, Mosel, and Xpress Workbench; by uploading (drag and drop or file selector) LP/MPS/SVF files via the Compute Interface app's user interface; or by sending Solver and Mosel jobs as requests to the web services REST API.

Data Storage

Xpress Insight 5 stores the operational data that it generates using either the native file system associated with your installed operating system, or a customer installation of MySQL v8.0 or above. File system storage is sufficient for use during development, but production deployments must use a database.

Insight Execution Worker

Workers are the machines that ultimately perform the optimization calculation. The execution worker may be installed to run on the same local machine as the client and server, or there could be several installed on separate machines. The installer defaults to install both the Execution Worker or the Server and database on the same machine, each option can be selected independently if required.

After completing the installation, you can configure whether Xpress Insight 5 operates in either Development Mode or Production Mode. These concepts are explained later in this guide and should be considered during installation. The requirements for each mode are shown below.

Installation Configurations
Mode Data store User Authentication SSO Encryption
Development Local SSO Optional
MySQL Local N/A
Production MySQL (recommended) SSO only Recommended
Covered Topics
  • Supported Platforms
    This software is available for installation on Windows 64-bit and Linux RHEL 7. systems.
  • Prerequisites
    This section details the prerequisites for using Xpress Insight 5.
Parent Topic Insight 5 Installation Guide