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Sep 21, 2022

Differentiating Relational Queries

Supply chain data present themselves almost exclusively as relational data such as orders, clients, suppliers, products, etc. Those data are collected through the business systems - the ERP, the CRM, the WMS - that are used to operate the company.

Sep 6, 2022

Reproducible Parallel Stochastic Gradient Descent

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most successful techniques ever devised for both machine learning and mathematical optimization. Lokad has been extensively exploiting the SGD for years for supply chain purposes, mostly through differentiable programming. Most of our clients have a least one SGD somewhere in their data pipeline.

Dec 6, 2021

Envision VM (part 4), Distributed Execution

The previous articles mostly examined how individual workers executed Envision scripts. However, both for resilience and for performance, Envision is actually executed across a cluster of machines.

Nov 29, 2021

Envision VM (part 3), Atoms and Data Storage

During execution, thunks read input data and write output data, often in large quantities. How to preserve this data from the moment it is created and until it is used (part of the answer is on NVMe drives spread over several machines), and how to minimize the amount of data that goes through channels slower than RAM (network and persistent storage).

Nov 22, 2021

Envision VM (part 2), Thunks and the Execution Model

Like most other parallel execution systems, Envision produces a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where each node represents an operation that needs to be performed, and each edge represents a data dependency where the downstream node needs the output of the upstream node in order to run.

Nov 15, 2021

Envision VM (part 1), Environment and General Architecture

A Supply Chain Optimization pipeline covers a wide range of data processing needs':' data ingestion and augmentation, feature extraction, probabilistic forecasting, producing optimal decisions under constraints, data exports, analytics, and dashboard creation.

May 7, 2021

Why FTP instead of REST

Most web apps feature web APIs styled as REST, yet Lokad features FTPS and SFTP, which may appear surprising. However, this choice is intentional, why did Lokad choose to go this route?

Oct 6, 2020

Factors of success in predictive supply chains

Wading through the miasma of supply chain technologies remains a challenge. What can help to guarantee success?

Jul 2, 2020

Ranked 6th out of 909 teams in the M5 forecasting competition

Lokad have come at the 6th position in the M5 Forecasting competition out of 909 competing teams. It’s an impressive feat.

Feb 4, 2020

Quantitative SCM vs Classic APS

Module-by-module comparison between classic APS (Advance Planning and Scheduling) systems and the quantitative supply chain as implemented by Lokad.

Jan 16, 2020

Why not Python

Envision, the domain-specific language (DSL) of Lokad, was engineered to address challenges where Python will never deliver cost-effective solutions.

Apr 3, 2019

Integers and uncertainty in differentiable programming

Technical insights on how two challenges are addressed from a differentiable programming perspective.