About this Site


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Welcome to RIOT!

RIOT, Remote Interactive Optimization Testbed, is a new offering for the WWW audience from the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department here at UC Berkeley. Its purpose is to fulfill the following four goals:
  • Educational
    Provide educational information via HTML and interactive problems presented through an easy to use interface.

  • Research
    Showcase state of the art algorithms developed locally by UC Berkeley Engineering faculty and abroad.

  • Comparative Research
    Provide efficiency information for different algorithms that solve similiar problems. Specific algorithms we are working on in this area include linear programming packages, semi-definite programming, convex programming packages and network flow algorithms.

  • Applications
    Showcase applications to solve general or specific problems interactively via the WWW. Problems that may be presented include: testing VLSI circuits, planning of mining operations, sports team tournaments problems (elimination of teams), scheduling, geometric algorithms for manufacturing purposes, clustering and pattern recognition, queueing and simulation applications.

Features

  • Only public domain software packages that were tested and found to be workable and reasonably efficient and easy to operate will be made available to users of RIOT. Some information about the software characteristics and performance (e.g. size limitation, speed) will be made available.
  • Users will be able to search for the appropriate software by searching through tree-structured taxonomy of optimization problems (e.g. max flow, linear programming). However, an important feature of the proposed site is that users who are not familiar with the jargon of optimization research will be able to interactively identify the proper software through a dialog provided by electronic forms.
  • To avoid time consuming transfer and installation of software packages, users will be able to test samples of their problems remotely on the proposed www site. Several choices regarding problem data structure will be available including some popular modeling languages and spread sheets. When comparing several software packages the users need only submit one set of problem data which will be automatically transformed to the data structure required by the different packages.
  • Optimization algorithms and applications developed within the University of California at Berkeley will be maintained and available for distribution on the proposed site. Software developed elsewhere will be available through links to appropriate www distribution sites.
  • The results of samples submitted by users (and their comments) will be used to update the data base recording the performance of the software packages. We anticipate that once a critical mass is reached, the proposed www site will become the primary place for optimization software developers to showcase their products as well as the primary source of optimization algorithms for end users.
  • For users unfamiliar with the algorithms covered, educational pages will be available that describe basic concepts.
  • Interative applications will be developed which will showcase the utility of select algorithms.


Access statistics for this site are available on-line.