# Playing with the Simplex Algorithm

I was originally planning to write a quick-and-dirty implementation of the simplex algorithm myself to demonstrate some of the gritty details, but I decided to leave that kind of thing for later, since there are going to be other, less well-known, constraint solving algorithms that I want to look atThe Cassowary algorithm is also a tableau-based algorithm, like the simplex algorithm, so I might spend a bit of time thinking about that in a bit more detail.. There is a Haskell implementation of a simple version of simplex algorithm in the Matrix.Simplex module in the dsp package, although that comes with a comment that says “I only guarantee that this module wastes inodes”, so let’s view this more as a way to play with some interface issues than a serious attempt to implement any kind of constraint solver! The code that goes with this article is available here.

## The simplex algorithm

The simplex algorithm, as implemented in Matrix.Simplex solves the following problem: find a vector $\mathbf{x} \in \mathbb{R}^N$ that minimises a linear objective function

$$z = \mathbf{c} \cdot \mathbf{x}$$ subject to the constraints $A \mathbf{x} = \mathbf{b}$, with all components of $\mathbf{x}$ non-negative, i.e. $x_i \geq 0$.

To set the problem up, you put all the coefficients of the objective function and the constraint equations into a big matrix (usually called the tableau), you turn the handle, then you pick the answers out of a transformed version of the tableau. This is very similar to the way that Gauss-Jordan elimination and such algorithms work (the simplex algorithm looks a lot like Gauss-Jordan elimination with some extra steps and restrictions), and is fine as far as it goes, but it’s not very convenient. Instead of building a big matrix, it would be nice to be able to set a problem up like this:

exampleSystem :: ConstraintSystem String
exampleSystem = buildSystem $do let [x1, x2, x3, x4] = map var ["x1", "x2", "x3", "x4"] con$ x1 + 2 * x3 <=# 740
con $2 * x2 - 7 * x4 <=# 0 con$ x2 - x3 + 2 * x4 >=# 1/2
con $x1 + x2 + x3 + x4 ==# 9 return$ -x1 - x2 - 3*x3 + 1/2*x4


The idea here is that we create some variables, here labelled with strings, although they can be labelled with anything with an Ord instance, we define some constraints, using comparison operators with a # stuck at the end to mark them as constraint operators, then we return an objective function. Some writer monad fiddling gives us a nice little monadic interface to build our system, and we then have a solve function of type

solve :: (Ord a, Show a, Slack a) => ConstraintSystem a ->
Either SimplexError (M.Map a Double)


that takes a constraint system, tries to solve it, and returns either an error or a map assigning numerical values to each of the variables.

This is all pretty pedestrian, but I wanted to have a play with these ideas because a real geometrical constraints system is going to be a bit more complicated and is going to incorporate some extra wrinkles that we don’t have here. The simplex algorithm example is nice and simple...

## Expressions

For the moment, I’m using a super-simple ADT for linear expressions, defined as

data Expr a = Expr { vars :: M.Map a Double, numval :: Double }
deriving (Show, Eq)


with a map from variable names to coefficients, plus a constant term. Num and Fractional instances are defined to make these act like numbers under the usual operators. For example, adding two expressions is defined as

(Expr vs1 c1) + (Expr vs2 c2) = Expr (M.unionWith (+) vs1 vs2) (c1 + c2)


Of course, there’s something slightly funny going on here, since we only really want to be able to construct linear expressions. I played around with this, and I sort of convinced myself that it ought to be possible to constrain expressions to linearity using phantom type methods, but I’ve not yet got it working. This is something I’m still undecided about, and the toy code I’ve written here just throws a run-time error when non-linear operations are attempted.

## Constraints

Constraints are very simple, built from a left-hand side expression, a right-hand side expression, and a comparison operator, one of <=#, ==# or >=#.

A constraint system is then a list of constraints and an objective function, which is just an expression. By defining ConstraintSystem as

type ConstraintSystem a = (Expr a, [Constraint a])


and defining a couple of writer monad related helpers

con c = tell [c]
buildSystem = runWriter


we can construct constraint systems like exampleSystem as shown above.

## Canonicalising...

The implementation of the simplex algorithm in Matrix.Simplex requires the problem to be in a canonical form, which has no inequality constraints, except for the requirement that all variables in the solution are non-negative. We can get from a constraint system involving inequality constraints to one with only equality constraints by introducing “slack” variables. For instance, if we have a constraint $x_1 + 2 x_3 \leq 740$, we can introduce a variable $s \geq 0$, and then write our original inequality constraint as the equality $x_1 + 2 x_3 + s = 740$. It’s pretty obvious how to do this for inequalities involving greater than signs as well.

The code to take a constraint system involving inequalities and transform it into an equivalent constraint system involving only equality constraints plus slack variables uses a typeclass called Slack whose sole purpose is to capture the idea of generating a name for a temporary variable. Here, I just define an instance for [Char], since this is what I’m using to label variables. The function makeSlacks does the transformation, introducing slack variables as needed for each inequality:

makeSlacks :: (Show a, Ord a, Slack a) => ConstraintSystem a -> ConstraintSystem a
makeSlacks (obj, cs) = (obj, zipWith makeSlack cs [1..])
where makeSlack (Constraint e1 EQL e2) _ = (e1 - e2 ==# 0)
makeSlack (Constraint e1 GEQ e2) s = (e1 - e2 - var (genSlk s) ==# 0)
makeSlack (Constraint e1 LEQ e2) s = (e1 - e2 + var (genSlk s) ==# 0)

class Slack a where
genSlk :: Int -> a

instance Slack [Char] where
genSlk s = "slk_" ++ show s


Given a canonical constraint system, we can then construct the initial tableau needed to run the simplex algorithm. This isn’t a very interesting step, since it just involves constructing a big array and systematically copying the coefficients from the constraints and the objective function in the canonical system into the right places.

Once we’ve run the simplex algorithm, we get either an error return indicating that the problem was unsatisfiable because there were no feasible values or the feasible region was unbounded, or a final tableau that contains the variable assignments for the optimal solution. Picking these out of the final tableau is kind of ugly, since we need to look for columns in the tableau that look like columns of a unit matrix. This isn’t hard to do, although it’s not pretty.

## Conclusions

One thing I confirmed from this little exercise is that things like the simplex algorithm are tricky (no surprise there). I was working with a version of the algorithm that’s about as simple as it’s possible to get, but it’s still quite complicated and there’s quite a bit of housekeeping to be done. (In fact, I think there is at least one minor error in the Matrix.Simplex code that I identified.)

The other main points that came out of this exercise were:

1. The writer monad approach to building constraint systems looks quite nice, and it ought to be possible to extend it to easily build and update more complex types of systems than the ones dealt with here.

2. Specialised expression types that catch attempts to build invalid constraints at compile time might be a good idea, although I’m not yet convinced that this would be convenient in more general cases. I’ll revisit this later once I have a better picture of the geometrical constraints we need to deal with.

3. Hiding the implementation details of algorithms like the simplex algorithm makes them much more usable. This will be even more true for the more complex cases I want to tackle later.

4. I need more Haskell practice. Everything more or less works, but some of the solutions I came up with are a little painful and could probably be cleaned up considerably.

There are two things I want to do next. The first is to read some literature, including the PhD thesis of Michael Gleicher which, in particular, deals with the issue of geometrical objects that have multiple “views” (e.g. Cartesian versus polar coordinates for a point, representation of a line segments by two end points or by a single point, a length and an angle, and so on). The second is to learn more about lenses, and to try to come up with a way to make lenses or some generalisation of them work nicely in a constraint setting.