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How Long Will the Solver Take to Tidy This Container Yard?

Before a port's planner runs a solver to reorder its stacked containers, can it tell how long the solver will take? Knowing the runtime up front stops an overnight job from running into the morning shift.

Use caseTechnologyPredictionModel evaluation

The table

Container pre-marshalling problems, each described by its features and the solver used, with the time the solver took. It's in Welt's research catalogue as Container Pre-Marshalling Algorithm Runtimes (CPMP 2015), 2,108 rows by 27 columns, licensed Public. The catalogue measures its signal at 0.37. At 2,108 rows and 26 features, TabICLv2 and Kumo Tabular Medium take the table as it is. The others can't take a table this size, so the walkthrough leaves them out.

Walkthrough

  1. Load it from the catalogue

    Find the table, read its recorded target and print the column names.

    import pandas as pd
    from welt import Client
    
    with Client() as client:
        item = client.research_datasets(q="container pre-marshalling", limit=1)["items"][0]
        info = client.research_dataset(item["id"])
        data = client.load_research_dataset(item["id"])
    
    target = info["targets"][0]
    target = target["name"] if isinstance(target, dict) else target
    print([column["name"] for column in info["schema"]], target)
  2. Pick the rows

    Set aside 20 rows to predict at the end, and keep the rest for the models to learn from.

    known = data.dropna(subset=[target])
    new_rows = known.sample(20, random_state=1)
    table = known.drop(new_rows.index)
  3. Compare the models and predict

    The models compete on the same folds against a simple guess, then the top-ranked one is fitted on the whole table. RMSE and MAE are average errors in the target's own units, so lower is better. The last table puts each prediction next to the real answer.

    with Client() as client:
        evaluation = client.evaluate(table, target, task="regression", seed=7,
                                     models=["tabicl-v2", "kumo-medium"])
        model = evaluation.fit()
    
    print(evaluation.summary()[["name", "rank", "rmse_mean", "mae_mean"]])
    features = new_rows.drop(columns=target)
    print(pd.DataFrame({"actual": new_rows[target].values, "predicted": model.predict(features)}))

What you get

A predicted runtimeSeconds per problem and solver, before you run it.
Better schedulingFit the slow jobs into the quiet hours.
An honest signalThe catalogue measures a modest signal, and the baseline comparison shows how much it helps.

Try it

Use Open with to run the research datasets notebook in Colab, Kaggle or Jupyter and search for "container pre-marshalling", or run the code above after pip install "welt-client[parquet]".