History of IPOPT

The original IPOPT (Fortran version) was a product of the dissertation research of Andreas Wächter [7], under the supervision of Lorenz T. Biegler at the Chemical Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University. The code was made open source and distributed by the COIN-OR initiative, which is now a non-profit corporation. IPOPT has been actively developed under COIN-OR since 2002.

To continue natural extension of the code and allow easy addition of new features, IBM Research decided to invest in an open source re-write of IPOPT in C++. With the help of Carl Laird, who came to the Mathematical Sciences Department at IBM Research as a summer intern in 2004 and 2005 during his PhD studies, the code was re-implemented from scratch.

The new C++ version of the IPOPT optimization code (IPOPT 3.0.0 and beyond) was maintained at IBM Research and remains part of the COIN-OR initiative. The development on the Fortran version has ceased, but the source code can still be downloaded from http://www.coin-or.org/download/source/Ipopt-Fortran.