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CloudSim Plus: A modern, highly extensible and easier-to-use Java 8 Framework for Modeling and Simulation of Cloud Computing Infrastructures and Services
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/*
 * CloudSim Plus: A modern, highly-extensible and easier-to-use Framework for
 * Modeling and Simulation of Cloud Computing Infrastructures and Services.
 * http://cloudsimplus.org
 *
 *     Copyright (C) 2015-2018 Universidade da Beira Interior (UBI, Portugal) and
 *     the Instituto Federal de Educação Ciência e Tecnologia do Tocantins (IFTO, Brazil).
 *
 *     This file is part of CloudSim Plus.
 *
 *     CloudSim Plus is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 *     it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 *     the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
 *     (at your option) any later version.
 *
 *     CloudSim Plus is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 *     but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 *     MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 *     GNU General Public License for more details.
 *
 *     You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 *     along with CloudSim Plus. If not, see .
 */
package org.cloudsimplus.heuristics;

/**
 * Provides the methods to be used for implementation of heuristics
 * to find solution for complex problems where the solution space
 * to search is large. These problems are usually NP-Hard ones
 * which the time to find a solution increases,
 * for instance, in exponential time. Such problems can be, for instance,
 * mapping a set of VMs to existing Hosts or mapping a set of Cloudlets
 * to VMs.
 *
 * A heuristic implementation thus provides an approximation of
 * an optimal solution (a suboptimal solution).
 * 
 *
 * Different heuristic can be implemented, such as
 * Tabu search,
 * Simulated annealing,
 * Hill climbing or
 * Ant colony optimization,
 * to name a few.
 *
 * @author Manoel Campos da Silva Filho
 * @param  the {@link HeuristicSolution class of solutions} the heuristic will deal with
 * @since CloudSim Plus 1.0
 */
public interface Heuristic> {

    /**
     * A property that implements the Null Object Design Pattern for {@link Heuristic}
     * objects.
     */
    Heuristic NULL = new HeuristicNull();

    /**
     * Computes the acceptance probability to define if a neighbor solution
     * has to be accepted or not, compared to the {@link #getBestSolutionSoFar()}.
     *
     * @return the acceptance probability, in scale from [0 to 1] where
     * 0 is to maintain the {@link #getBestSolutionSoFar() current solution},
     * 1 is to accept the neighbor solution, while intermediate
     * values defines the probability that the neighbor solution
     * will be randomly accepted.
     */
    double getAcceptanceProbability();

	/**
	 * Gets a random number between 0 (inclusive) and maxValue (exclusive).
	 *
	 * @param maxValue the max value to get a random number (exclusive)
	 * @return the random number
	 */
    int getRandomValue(int maxValue);

    /**
     * Checks if the solution search can be stopped.
     *
     * @return true if the solution search can be stopped, false otherwise.
     */
    boolean isToStopSearch();

    /**
     * Gets the initial solution that the heuristic will start from
     * in order to try to improve it. If not initial solution was
     * generated yet, one should be randomly generated.
     * @return the initial randomly generated solution
     */
    S getInitialSolution();

    /**
     *
     * @return latest neighbor solution created
     * @see #createNeighbor(HeuristicSolution)
     */
    S getNeighborSolution();

    /**
     * Creates a neighbor solution cloning a source one
     * and randomly changing some of its values.
     * A neighbor solution is one that is close to the current solution
     * and has just little changes.
     *
     * @param source the source to create a neighbor solution
     * @return the cloned and randomly changed solution that represents a neighbor solution
     */
    S createNeighbor(S source);

    /**
     *
     * @return best solution found out up to now
     */
    S getBestSolutionSoFar();

    /**
     *
     * @return the number of times a neighbor solution will be searched
     * at each iteration of the {@link #solve() solution find}.
     */
    int getNumberOfNeighborhoodSearchesByIteration();

    /**
     * Sets the number of times a neighbor solution will be searched
     * at each iteration of the {@link #solve() solution find}.
     *
     * @param numberOfNeighborhoodSearches number of neighbor searches to perform
     * at each iteration
     */
    void setNumberOfNeighborhoodSearchesByIteration(int numberOfNeighborhoodSearches);

	/**
	 * Starts the heuristic to find a suboptimal solution.
	 * After the method finishes, you can call the {@link #getBestSolutionSoFar()}
	 * to get the final solution.
	 *
	 * @return the final solution
	 * @see #getBestSolutionSoFar()
	 * @TODO @author manoelcampos Try to parallelize the solution finding in order
	 * to reduce search time using Parallel Streams.
	 */
	S solve();

	/**
	 *
	 * @return the time taken to finish the solution search (in seconds).
	 * @see #solve()
	 */
	double getSolveTime();
}