Cloud service for interactive simulation of production location

The paper deals with a problem of decision-making support for production location problem. The paper describes the mathematical model of production location. Minimization of total cost of delivery of raw materials to the place of production is used as a criterion of potential production location. The problem belongs to the class of binary mathematical programming problems with linear constraints but could be reduced to a set of linear programming problems solved by sequential or parallel computing. Based on the mathematical model а software tool is implemented as a cloud service on heterogeneous computing architecture. The software architecture includes the simulation module and modules for control and visualization. The ontology and declarative model for information exchange between the modules are designed with JSON format. This declarative model includes the objects considered in the mathematical model which are “products”, “areas” and “communications”. The simulation module is implemented on a high-performance server platform. Visualization module allows us to present graphically the original and the resulting matrix data and to modify the input parameters of the model interactively. The control and visualization modules are produced within IACPaaS cloud platform. Communication between the modules is established via asynchronous http-queries. The paper demonstrates the use of the software tool for the simulation of production location for the Russian Far East regions based on input data provided by open statistics sources.