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Comment by LPisGood | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone use Hexaly for any serious work? If so, why? There seem to be many better alternatives out there.

I'm curious too. And what are the far better alternatives in your opinion?

Hexaly claims to go far beyond MIP. Amazon uses it for packing VMs into servers. This video by one of their research scientists was widely circulated at the time [1].

I work on combinatorial optimization too but a specific problem so we write the heuristics from scratch. Seems exact solvers are doing a lot more these days?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIh6d3rb0_4

Gurobi is far better for almost every instance I’ve seen. There are also custom heuristics which win in almost every case. Finally, while I have not tried them, there are some apparently high quality options like TimeFold which exist.

The main reason why companies might prefer Hexaly is their emphasis on quickly finding high Quality feasible primal solutions.

I get that this is their goal, however they aren’t particularly strong in this area compared to free alternatives, traditional MIP, and custom heuristics.

I guess it depends on what your application is here. Hexaly primarily focuses on Routing, Packing and Scheduling problems, which have strong Combinatorial components. My experience with those type of problems is that Hexaly is in its own league above the MIP solvers, especially at scale. For applications like portfolio optimization or network design MIP solvers still fare a lot better.

Amazon has been quite vocal about using Hexaly.

All vendors just need 1 engineer in a BigCorp to have used their software to claim "Trusted by BigCorpName"

This is essentially my understanding of the situation. The OR applications are extremely diverse there; they use most wvery solver and technique under the sun for something.

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