Concepts and Components
The Xpress Insight system incorporates several physical components, logical concepts and data artifacts.
Key physical components include:
- Xpress Insight Server: The core of the system, which may be located on the same local machine as the web client or on a remote server, depending on the system configuration. It is typically installed as a service but may also be manually started and stopped from the Start menu options.
- Xpress Insight Repository: This is a hierarchical database that stores all of the data managed by Xpress Insight. It is installed on—and must always be located on—the same machine as the Xpress Insight Server.
- Xpress Insight Web Client: A browser-based user interface to the Xpress Insight system, through which apps and scenarios can be manipulated.
- Execution Workers: These are the machines that ultimately run scenarios. A typical Xpress Insight configuration may include one or more local or remote execution worker.
- Tableau for FICO Server: An optional component required if you wish to integrate Tableau visualizations with the Xpress Insight user interface as custom views for advanced reporting.
- Mirror Database: This contains scenario data used in Tableau reporting.
Logical concepts include:
- Execution Services: These are used by Xpress Insight to execute scenarios when mapped to execution workers. An execution service represents a logical partition of its associated worker's processing capabilities.
- Execution Service Mappings: Provide links between the defined execution services and their associated execution workers.
- Execution Modes: A mechanism that enables scenario developers to specify their likely processing needs and are usually expressed as annotations.
Key data artifacts:
- Apps: Apps are the parent object in Xpress Insight and contain one model and one or more user-created scenarios. Apps can be loaded as standalone BIM (compiled model) files or as ZIP archives of a BIM file and associated resources.
- Models: The optimization model itself, defining a set of input entities to receive scenario data and a set of result entities that are populated with the optimization solution. A solution is a set of values representing the decisions identified by the optimization process, together with other data synthesized from these values. It contains a set of constraints that place restrictions on what can be valid solutions.
- Scenarios: Scenarios contain the input data for the model and its results. A scenario must be loaded before its input data can be initialized, and executed before its results can be examined.