Introduction to the FICO Xpress Insight 5 Administrator 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 section provides a high-level overview of the concepts and components of the Xpress Insight 5 platform.
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.
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 should use a database.
Xpress Insight 5 operates in either Development mode or Production mode. Development mode permits local accounts while Production mode utilizes SAML 2.0 identity verification and disables local accounts, so should be used for operational installations.
Users can submit a compute job in several ways:
- Solver jobs can be submitted using the Xpress software. The Optimizer Console, Optimizer libraries, Mosel, and Xpress Workbench can be configured to transparently out-source optimization processing to a remote Insight Server.
- Solver jobs can be created by uploading (drag and drop or file selector) LP/MPS/SVF files via the Compute Interface app's user interface.
- Solver and Mosel jobs can be sent as requests to the web services REST API. A web socket API is also available for monitoring the progress of submitted jobs.
Users of this software will need knowledge of the following software.
- FICO Xpress v8.11 — For more, see the FICO Xpress Installation Guide.
- Java™ 11.0.2 or later, Oracle Java or OpenJDK 11 64-bit
- Internet Explorer 11 or the latest version of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.
- MySQL v8.0 or above — MySQL storage must be installed by the customer as it is not provided by FICO.
In addition, the administrator should also have the following permissions.
- If you are deploying Xpress Insight 5 in Production mode, or you want to run in Development mode using Single Sign On (SSO), you must have access to the administration pages of your SSO Identity Provider (IdP).
This software can be installed on various operating systems, for more see the
Xpress Insight 5 Installation Guide section on
Supported Platforms.