Optimization and Controlled Systems: A Case Study on Thermal Aware Workload Dispatching

Although successfully employed on many industrial problems, Combinatorial Optimization still has limited applicability on several real-world domains, often due to modeling difficulties. This is typically the case for systems under the control of an on-line policy: even when the policy itself is well known, capturing its effect on the system in a declarative model is often impossible by conventional means. Such a difficulty is at the root of the classical, sharp separation between off- line and on-line approaches. In this paper, we investigate a general method to model controlled systems, based on the integration of Machine Learning and Constraint Programming (CP). Specifically, we use an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to learn the behavior of a controlled system (a multicore CPU with thermal con- trollers) and plug it into a CP model by means of Neuron Constraints. The method obtains significantly better results compared to an approach with no ANN guidance. Neuron Constraints were first introduced in [Bartolini et al., 2011b] as a mean to model complex systems: providing evidence of their applicability to controlled systems is a significant step forward, broadening the application field of combinatorial methods and disclosing opportunities for hybrid off-line/on-line optimization.