DG-Query: An XQuery-based Decision Guidance Query Language
Alexander Brodsky, Shane G. Halder, Juan Luo · 2014
Decision optimization is desired in many strategic business decisions such as those for finding the best production planning in manufacturing. An optimization model may indicate the total cost of a certain supply chain given the various sourcing and transportation options used; the corresponding optimization problem can be to select among all possible sourcing and transportation options to minimize the total cost. Optimization modelling requires considerable mathematical expertise and effort to generate effective models. Additionally, the optimization process is heavily dependent on data. However, optimization languages such as IBM’s ILOG CPLEX OPL and Bell Laboratories’ AMPL, do not provide native support for XML (Extensible Markup Language) which has become a ubiquitous standard (W3C) for data exchange between organizations. On the other hand, XQuery is a language for querying and manipulating XML data, similar to SQL for querying a relational database, but XQuery has no optimization functionality. To resolve this gap, this paper proposes DG-Query, an XQuery-based Analytics Language, which addresses the aforementioned issues. This is accomplished by first annotating existing XQuery expressions to precisely express the optimization semantics, and second to translate the annotated queries into an equivalent mathematical programming (MP) formulation that can be solved efficiently. This paper presents DG-Query with examples and provides its formal syntax and semantics. Also included is an implementation method through a reduction to MP formulation.