Tuning parameters of large neighborhood search for the machine reassignment problem

Data centers are a critical and ubiquitous resource for providing infrastructure for banking, Internet and electronic commerce. One way of managing data centers efficiently is to minimize a cost function that takes into account the load of the machines, the balance among a set of available resources of the machines, and the costs of moving processes while respecting a set of constraints. This problem is called the machine reassignment problem. An instance of this online problem can have several tens of thousands of processes. Therefore, the challenge is to solve a very large sized instance in a very limited time. In this paper, we describe a constraint programming-based Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) approach for solving this problem. The values of the parameters of the LNS can have a significant impact on the performance of LNS when solving an instance. We, therefore, employ the Instance Specific Algorithm Configuration (ISAC) methodology, where a clustering of the instances is maintained in an offline phase and the parameters of the LNS are automatically tuned for each cluster. When a new instance arrives, the values of the parameters of the closest cluster are used for solving the instance in the online phase. Results confirm that our CP-based LNS approach, with high quality parameter settings, finds good quality solutions for very large sized instances in very limited time. Our results also significantly outperform the hand-tuned settings of the parameters selected by a human expert which were used in the runner-up entry in the 2012 EURO/ROADEF Challenge.