April 8, 2016: CBC now available on Google Sheets

A new version of OpenSolver for Google Sheets added support for the COIN-OR CBC solver via NEOS. This free app allows LP and IP models to be formulated and solved online within Google Sheets. For more details, see here.

June 23, 2015: RBFOpt - A New Library for Black-box Optimization

RBFOpt is a library written in Python for black-box (also known as derivative-free) optimization. It is a global solver that requires zero-order information - just function values, not even gradients! RBFOpt is aimed at finding the global minimum in a small number of function evaluations, which is particularly useful when each function evaluation requires an expensive computation, e.g. a time-consuming computer simulation.

May 5, 2015: Rehearse - A New Library for Algebraic Modeling in C++

Rehearse is an algebraic modeling library in C++, that has been added to the COIN-OR repository. It works in a very similar way to the equivalent proprietary ILOG Concert © library.

November 5, 2014: 2014 INFORMS Impact Prize Winners

The INFORMS Impact Prize recognizes an individual or team whose contributions have had a widespread impact on the practice of operations research. With great pride, the COIN-OR Strategic Leadership Board extends its congratulations to nine of the pioneers of COIN-OR, Brenda Dietrich, JP Fasano, John Forrest, Lou Hafer, Brady Hunsaker, Laszlo Ladanyi, Robin Lougee, Ted Ralphs, and Matthew Saltzman, the recipients of the 2014 INFORMS Impact Prize.

In its citation, the Impact Prize Award Committee writes: The Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR) is an initiative to spur the development of open-source software for the operations research community in order to accelerate the adoption and the evolution of computational operations research. COIN-OR provides development tools, distribution, standards, licensing information, and other infrastructure needed to facilitate and nurture open, community-driven software.

The COIN-OR initiative was launched at the 2000 International Symposium on Mathematical Programming as a three-year experiment by IBM Research. In 2004, a dedicated nonprofit corporation was formed to take over the successful and growing initiative. In the fourteen years of its existence, COIN-OR has grown from its initial offerings of four software projects, to more than fifty projects spanning much of computational operations research. COIN-OR has influenced every aspect of operations research: research, practice, education, community, and outreach.

Software supported by COIN-OR has been an essential part of hundreds of peer-reviewed research papers and is embedded in dozens of software systems, including the most widely used environments for performing analytics in practice. People use COIN-OR software every day to implement advanced operations research solutions to important problems. Through its on-line, in-person, and print activities, COIN-OR has been educating the operations research world about OR software and the potential of open source.

Thousands of people have been involved with COIN-OR; over 1400 people subscribe to one or more COIN-OR mailing lists today. COIN-OR is the result of the collaboration of many people over many years, but there are key individuals whose significant early contributions and leadership distinguish them. We recognize the individuals who launched COIN-OR at IBM Research, where the initiative was conceived and grew over the first four years to a successful community repository, and the individuals who incorporated the non-profit COIN-OR Foundation, Inc., where the initiative has thrived and continues to grow today. For their pivotal role in the creation and wide-spread adoption of COIN-OR, INFORMS is pleased to award the 2014 Impact Prize to Brenda Dietrich, JP Fasano, John Forrest, Lou Hafer, Brady Hunsaker, Laszlo Ladanyi, Robin Lougee, Ted Ralphs, and Matthew Saltzman.

The INFORMS Impact Prize recognizes nine individuals. Without diminishing the well-deserved recognition given to the recipients, the Board would also like to extend its congratulations to all the members of the COIN-OR community. The COIN-OR initiative would not have been so successful without all those individuals who have contributed their time, expertise and software to support our endeavors, and all those users who have spurred us on to greater effort with their valuable feedback. The Board takes this opportunity to recognise the accomplishments of our community over the past decade. We look forward to the accomplishments we know will come in the future.

October 10, 2014: New Project Paver for Performance Data Comparison

Paver is a collection of Python scripts meant to simplify the task of performance data comparison and visualization. Some example usages of PAVER can be found at here.  This paper describes the setup, usage, and features of Paver.

August 5, 2014: New COIN-OR project: qpOASES

qpOASES is an open-source C++ implementation of the recently proposed online active set strategy for solving quadratic programming (QP) problems. It has several theoretical features that make it particularly suited for model predictive control (MPC) applications. Further numerical modifications have made qpOASES a reliable QP solver, even when tackling semi-definite, ill-posed or degenerated QP problems. Moreover, several interfaces to third-party software make the code easy-to-use. qpOASES is being developed since 2007 and has proved useful in numerous real-world applications and industrial projects.

May 3, 2014: MC++, A Toolkit for Bounding Factorable Functions

Benoit Chachuat announced a new project in COIN-OR: MC++ provides an implementation of various methods for computing bounds for factorable functions, in the form
of convex/concave relaxations, Taylor models, or spectral bounds. A main objective in developing MC++ has been to make the bounds computation as simple and
natural as possible, similar to existing interval arithmetic libraries. This way, MC++ can be quite useful for the fast prototyping and testing of new
algorithms and ideas in global or robust optimization. More information about MC++ can be found at here. 

May 3, 2014: JuMP 0.5 Released

The JuMP Team announced the release of JuMP 0.5, an open-source algebraic modeling language in Julia, now with support for algebraic modeling of nonlinear problems using Ipopt with a familiar scalar-based syntax similar to AMPL and GAMS. JuMP can efficiently compute sparse Jacobians and Hessians for large-scale problems using reverse-mode automatic differentiation coupled with Julia's powerful just-in-time compilation abilities to generate and compile specialized matrix generators at runtime, all in memory. For example code, see the documentation.

March 11, 2014: Stochastic Modeling Interface Enhancements

The Smi (Stochastic Modeling Interface) has the capability to assemble stochastic linear programs based on scenario trees. Alan King announced that quadratic programming has recently been added to the Smi capabilities. The current stable version 0.94 includes interfaces for constructing a quadratic stochastic program using the core problem / stochastic data paradigm. The unit test contains a use case.

March 4, 2014: New Release of CMPL

Mike Steglich announded the release of CMPL 1.9.0. New main features and change log can found here.

October 7, 2013: COIN-OR Cup 2013 Winner

The winner of the 2013 COIN-OR INFORMS Cup is a parallel, distributed-memory simplex implementation for large-scale block-angular LPs, motivated by energy applications of two-stage stochastic programming. At the core of the implementation is specialized linear algebra for factorizing and solving linear systems with the simplex basis matrix at each iteration. COIN-OR libraries, in particular the CoinFactorization class of the CoinUtils package, were a foundation for their implementation.

May 14, 2012: OpenOffice 3.4.0 Uses COIN-OR Tools

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced availability of OpenOffice version 3.4.0. Among its new features: The linear programming solver in the Calc spreadsheet program has been replaced with COIN-OR tools. The spreadsheet uses the CoinMP API, which in turn uses the COIN-OR Brach and Cut MIP solver (CBC) and the COIN-OR Linear Programming solver (CLP) as solver engines, the Open Solver Interface (OSI), the Cut Generator Library (CGL) and the CoinUtils utility library.

September 29, 2011: Rose joined COIN-OR

David Savourey and Leo Liberti announced the new ROSE (Reformulation/Optimization Software Engine) project.  ROSE is an automatic reformulation software for mathematical programs. ROSE works either stand-alone (mostly for debugging purposes) or as an AMPL solver. As AMPL is very much closed-source and has no facilities for editing a "structured formulations" (i.e. a formulation involving indices and quantifiers) in memory, ROSE writes its output (usually a reformulated version of the mathematical programming formulation given in input) as a text file. This may be an input to a further processing software (such as a numerical solver), or a "flat formulation" (i.e. a formulation without indices where all the parameter symbols have been replaced by numerical data) again in AMPL format. More information can be found in here.

June 8, 2011: Announcing CMPL

Mike Steglich and Thomas Schleiff announced CMPL. CMPL is a mathematical programming language and a system for modelling, solving and analysing linear programming (LP) problems and mixed integer programming (MIP) problems. The CMPL syntax is similar in formulation to the original mathematical model but also includes syntactic elements from modern programming languages. CMPL uses the COIN-OR OSSolverService to solve LP and MIP problems. For more information, please visit the CMPL project page.

April 7, 2011: IPOPT Wins the Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

The 2011 Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software will be awarded to Andreas Waechter (IBM T. J.  Watson Research Center) and Carl Laird (Texas A&M University) for IPOPT, a software library for solving nonlinear, nonconvex, large-scale continuous optimization problems. The presentation of the award will take place at the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM 2011) in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

September 29, 2010: Tutorial on COIN-OR

Kipp Martin was asked to write a tutorial on COIN-OR for Interfaces. This tutorial, "COIN-OR: Software for the OR Community", is due to be published in the November-December 2010 issue, Vol. 40, No. 6. 

March 11, 2010: The Coin Bazaar Project

Bill Hart announced the new Coin Bazaar project. This COIN-OR project facilitates community involvement in the COIN-OR repositories by allowing OR researchers to contribute code examples, application examples and code extensions and plug-ins without directly contributing to a regular COIN-OR project. Thus, this project helps bridge the gap between core package development and package extensions. Specific goals of this project are:
  • To manage extensions to COIN-OR packages that have limited subversion access
  • Allow developers and COIN-OR users to share code and application examples
  • Provide a home for auxiliary software tools that facilitate the use of COIN-OR tools

Coin Bazaar projects are managed within separate directories in the Coin Bazaar subversion repository. Subversion access control is used to manage edits for each project. Although these projects are intended for public distribution, the access control mechanism also supports non-public development (e.g. while preparing a publication). Note that each project is licensed separately, and our intent is not to require that Coin Bazaar projects be licensed consistently (e.g. all under the EPL). See here for instructions for contributing to Coin Bazaar and here for the list of current projects.

March 4, 2010: DIP Framework

Matt Galati and Ted Ralphs announced the addition of the Decomposition in Integer Programming (DIP) framework to the COIN-OR repository. DIP is an open-source, extensible framework for implementing decomposition-based bounding algorithms for use in solving large-scale discrete optimization problems. The framework provides a simple API for experimenting with various decomposition-based algorithms, such as Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition, Lagrangian relaxation, and various cutting plane methods. Given a compact formulation and a relaxation, the framework takes care of all algorithmic details associated with implementing any of a wide range of decomposition-based algorithms, such as branch and cut, branch and price, branch and cut and price, subgradient-based Lagrangian relaxation, branch and relax and cut, and decompose and cut. The user can specify customizations, such as methods for generating valid inequalities and branching, in terms of the variables of the compact formulation, without having to worry about the details of any required reformulations. DIP is used in combination with CHiPPS, which provides the underlying tree search methodology required to execute decomposition-based branch-and-bound algorithms using DIP. The DIP project page can be reached at here. The current stable version of DIP is 0.8 and the most recent release is 0.8.2.

December 31, 2009: PuLP: A python library for modeling LP/MILP

Stuart Mitchell announced the release of PuLP 1.4.2. PuLP is a python library for modeling Linear and Integer Programming Problems. PuLP can generate MPS or LP files and call GLPK, COINMP, CBC, CPLEX, and GUROBI to solve the  problems. PuLP requires Python >= 2.5.  but can be made to work on Python2.4 as well. Pulp comes with Binaries for COINMP complied for both MS Windows and Ubuntu Linux and should be able to work 'out of the box' in those
environments.

Pulp has been in development since 2007 by J.S Roy and is now maintained by Stuart Mitchell. Stuart uses Pulp on a daily basis for a number of projects. As well as being a free, open source modeling language (BSD license). PuLP is implemented in Python a powerful scripting language. The documentation includes some modelling case studies and will eventually include all of the case studies found at here.

Comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions are welcome. For more information, please visit this website.

December 4, 2009: AIMMSlinks

AIMMS is pleased to announce the new COIN-OR project AIMMSlinks, which is dedicated to the development of links between the modeling language AIMMS and solvers that are hosted at COIN-OR. The project is released under the Common Public License. With AIMMSlinks, users can create an interface between AIMMS and a COIN-OR solver using the AIMMS Open Solver Interface API. Currently, the links to Cbc and Ipopt are available. The project page with download and installation instructions can be found here. A mailing list is also available for discussion, asking questions, proposing new features, etc.

November 2, 2009: PFunc: A new library for task parallelism

PFunc, short for Parallel Functions, is a lightweight and portable library that provides C and C++ APIs to express task parallelism. The features offered by PFunc are a strict superset of the features offered by current solutions for task parallelism such as Cilk and Threading Building Blocks. Some of  highlights of PFunc are:

  • Custom Priorities for tasks.
  • Custom Scheduling for tasks.
  • Task Groups for collective communication.
  • Nested Parallelism
  • Generic
  • Open Source

Being designed using generic programming principles, PFunc allows users to customize their run at compile-time without any performance penalties. PFunc has been released under the Eclipse Public License v1.0.

For more information, please visit this website.

October 12, 2009: COIN-OR Cup goes to a team from Queen's and Cornell Universities.

Yuri Levin, Tatsiana Levina, Jeff McGill, Mikhail Nediak and Huseyin Topaloglu applied COIN-OR technologies DFO and IPOPT to develop novel techniques for cargo capacity management and dynamic pricing.

Congratulations to our 2009 COIN-OR Cup Winners!

October 10, 2009: Events at INFORMS

For those attending INFORMS, there will be three important events .
  • COIN-OR Cup Celebration (Sponsored by IBM): Celebrating the COIN-OR community and presenting COIN-OR Cup.

    Day: Monday, October 12, 2009
    Time: 9:00 - 11:00 pm
    Location: Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery, 401 G St., San Diego, CA 92101
    Organizer: Bill Hart
  • COIN-OR Members & Users Meeting

    Day: Monday, October 12, 2009
    Time: 12:15 - 1:15PM
    Location: C-25A
    Organizer: Bob Fourer
  • Panel Discussion: COIN-OR Technology Forum

    Day: Thuesday, October 13, 2009
    Time: 11:00 - 12:30 PM
    Location: C-26B
    Organizer: Matt Saltzman

October 10, 2009: New Legal Policies Proposed

The COIN-OR Foundation's Strategic Leadership Board is pleased to announce the release of new document outlining a proposed change in legal policy. This document is now available for public comment here. The new policy is aimed at streamlining project acceptance procedures and ensuring the repository remains as open as possible while maintaining respect for intellectual property laws and transparency with regard to the legal pedigree of hosted codes. We would appreciate any feedback we can get from the user community regarding how this change in policy might affect your ability to use or contribute to the growing collection of software in COIN.

August 25, 2009: Visual Studio Project Files

Kipp Martin has provided a distribution of executables, libraries, and sample code for numerous COIN-OR projects including Optimization Services (OS Release 2.0).  This distribution is available for downloading via this link. The target audience includes users of Microsoft Windows who want to solve optimization problems without having to compile the COIN-OR source, as well as Visual Studio developers of projects that link to COIN-OR solver libraries.

July 22, 2009: METSlib Metaheuristic library

Mirko Maischberger announced the METSlib project, a metaheuristics modeling framework and optimization toolkit in C++ released under the GPLv3 or, at your opinion, the CPL 1.0. Currently,  the toolkit implements the basics of some metaheuristic algorithms

  • Local Search,
  • Simulated Annealing, and
  • Tabu Search.

Users can create their own models and use the built-in algorithms to find solutions. Also, users can implement other metaheuristics by using existing modules as building blocks.

November 7, 2008: A New MINLP Solver: Couenne

Pietro Belotti announced that a new solver for Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problems is available in COIN-OR: Couenne (Convex Over and Under ENvelopes for Nonlinear Estimation) is a branch and bound algorithm for solving MINLPs.  It has been developed within a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University and the IBM TJ Watson Research Center. The collaboration aims at developing new algorithms for solving general MINLP problems. Couenne was developed in C++ and uses other COIN-OR code, including Bonmin, Cbc, Cgl, Clp, Ipopt, and Osi. Information on the development status of Couenne, downloading and installation instructions, as well as a link to browse through Couenne's source code, can be found on its COIN-OR project page.

October 26, 2008:  OR-Ohio (Operations Research) Advanced Lecture Series

On November 7, 2008, Kipp Martin will give a seminar to introduce COIN-OR, and show how to build applications and solve optimization problems by using various COIN-OR libraries. The seminar is open to the graduate students at University of Cincinnati. 

September 30, 2008: COIN-OR at INFORMS DC Meeting

There will be a number of exciting COIN-OR events at the INFORMS DC Meeting (Oct. 11 - Oct. 15), including the first ever COIN-OR "Vendor Workshop".

August 28, 2008: The Fourth Annual "COIN-OR INFORMS Cup" Competition

Announcing the fourth annual "COIN-OR INFORMS Cup" competition --- the most coveted prize in computational OR! More details about the competition rules, time and location can be found in the COIN-OR INFORMS Cup webpage.

August 17, 2008: GAMSlinks Stable Revision 0.4

Stefan Vigerske ( Humboldt-University Berlin) announced the release of GAMSlinks stable revision 04. New features and changes are summarized as follows.

  • An interface to the Optimization Services project had been added. GAMS/OS allows to translate GAMS models into OSiL instances, to solve them locally or remotely, and to write the result into a GAMS solution file.
  • A GAMS interface to the MIP solver of the Branch-Cut-and-Price framework SCIP from Zuse Institute Berlin has been added. SCIP can use CLP as LP subsolver. SCIP is freely available for academic use.
  • The Cbc, Bonmin, and SCIP interfaces have been extended to support the GAMS Branch-and-Cut-and-Heuristic Facility (BCH). BCH allows a GAMS user to develop their own, often problem-specific, cut and heuristic callbacks in the GAMS model space without having intimate knowledge of the underlying solver.
  • Many smaller changes and bug fixes round up the new release 0.4 of this project.

April 13, 2008: New TestTools Project

JP Fasano (IBM Research), Kipp Martin (University of Chicago), and Stefan Vigerske (Humboldt- University Berlin) have announced the first release of the COIN-OR TestTools project under the Common Public License. The TestTools project provides Python scripts to automatically download, configure, build, test, and install COIN-OR projects. They are currently used to run nightly tests of many COIN-OR projects on approximately 15 platforms. Eventually we hope to use these scripts to regularly create and provide binary distributions of COIN-OR projects for several popular platforms. Currently, the following COIN-OR projects can be tested with these scripts: CoinUtils, Clp, Osi, DyLP, SYMPHONY, Vol, Cgl, Cbc, Smi, FlopC++, Ipopt, Bonmin, OS, CppAD, LaGO, GAMSlinks, CoinAll.

April 3, 2008: CppAD Now Available Using yum on Fedora

Fedora is one of the top Linux operating system distributions, with huge visibility.  yum is a software package manager --  a tool for installing, updating, and removing packages and their dependencies on RPM (Red Hat Package Manager)-based systems.  And now, CppAD, a COIN-OR tool for differentiation of C++ functions, can be installed using yum on Fedora.   Packaging CppAD as an RPM in a Fedora repository slots it into a familiar and well-established infrastructure for receiving software updates.  Anyone out there with yum (not just Fedora users) can tap into the repository structure for updates.  A simple `yum update' command is all it takes to check and update all software packages in your system.   No further expertise required.  This sort of convenience and accessibility is where COIN-OR is headed with the idea of RPMs and the Coin-All project. yum users can find a list of all the available CppAD packages and updates by using the command “yum list 'cppad-*'.” Getting a package into the Fedora repository is quite an achievement – hats off to CppAD’s project manager Brad Bell (University of Washington) on this accomplishment.

April 1, 2008: FlopC++  Progress in Supporting Stochastic

A goal of COIN-OR’s FlopC++ algebraic modeling environment is to support stochastic optimization. To that end, Michal Kaut (Molde University College), Tim Hultberg (EUMETSAT ) and Alan King (IBM Research) have developed an example of a multiperiod stochastic program in FlopC++.  Modeling environments for stochastic programming must meet two opposing requirements: they must implement a modeling paradigm familiar to users of mathematical programming software and extend it for stochastic programming; and they must produce artifacts that support sequential, frequent, and repeated processing of model information during the solution of the stochastic program itself.  The new example is from a financial investment problem, in which an investor wishes to solve a multiperiod asset allocation problem. The problem is described in FlopC++ syntax, and the model data is passed to the SmiScnModel class in Coin-OR's Stochastic Modeling Interface project (Smi). Users interested in downloading a version of the project can locate it on the SVN tree in FlopC++ under a branch called "stochastic".

December 31, 2007: COIN-OR Foundation Election Results

At the end of 2007, elections were held for three open positions on the business board, and one open position on the technical advisory council of the educational non-profit corporation that runs COIN-OR. Matthew Saltzman (Clemson University), Mike Trick (CMU), and Randy Kiefer (INFORMS) were elected to the Strategic Leadership Board of the COIN-OR Foundation, Inc. joining existing members Bob Fourer (Northwestern University), Kevin Furman (Exxon-Mobil), Lou Hafer (Simon Fraser Univeristy) , Robin Lougee-Heimer (IBM) and Ted Ralphs (Lehigh University).  Andreas Waechter (IBM Research) was elected to the Technical Leadership Council, joining existing members JP Fasano, Laszlo Ladanyi (IBM Research), Leo Lopes (University of Arizona), Francois Margot (CMU), Kipp Martin (University of Chicago), and Ted Ralphs.  While the full-members of the Foundation elect the Board and Council members, the officers of each body are self-determined. The Board Members elected Matthew Saltzman as President, Ted Ralphs as Treasurer, and Bob Fourer as Secretary.  The Council Members elected Ted Ralphs as Chair. Congratulations to the new officers. For more details on the COIN-OR Foundation are available at http://www.coin-or.org/foundation.html.

November 5, 2007: John Tomlin Wins the 2007 COIN-OR Cup

    Congratulations to John Tomlin (Yahoo!), winner of the 3rd Annual COIN-OR Cup. John Tomlin was awarded the Cup at a ceremony held in conjunction with the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle, WA. John has been a long-time supporter of op en-source and COIN-OR. In the past year, John has used COIN-OR in his collaboration with colleagues on the implementation of two innovative and important projects at Yahoo! Read more about John's work and see pictures of the ceremony on citation link.

November 1, 2007: COIN Software Wins First Open Contest of Parallel Programming

    We are pleased to announce that a parallel TSP solver comprised entirely of COIN software has won the first Open Contest of Parallel Programming at the 19th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing. The contest description is here. The software was authored by Yan Xu and Ted Ralphs building on the following COIN projects: In the open source tradition, source code for the solver is now included in CHiPPS.

January 3, 2007: New COIN-OR Project GAMSlinks

    The COIN-OR Foundation is pleased to announce the new COIN-OR project GAMSlinks, which is devoted to the development of links between the General Algebraic Modeling System (GAMS) and solvers that are hosted at COIN-OR. With this new project, you are able to create your own interface between GAMS and one of the supported COIN-OR solvers. So far, Cbc (with Clp as LP olver) and Glpk (via OSI) are supported. It is planned to provide a link to IPOPT in the near future.

November 5, 2006: COIN Cup Awarded

    The team of Jonathan Eckstein, Bill Hart, and Cindy Phillips was awarded the COIN-OR Cup for 2006 at a ceremony that took place at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, PA. This team from Sandia National Labs and Rutgers University has contributed to COIN-OR in a variety of ways since early in the project's history, including the following:
    • Incorporation of COIN-OR tools, including CoinUtils, OSI, CGL, and CLP in the open-source PICO and PEBBL solvers.
    • Extensive quality assurance testing of COIN-OR components on a variety of computational platforms.
    • Contributions of patches, bug fixes, and suggestions for OSI, CoinUtils, and other components of the COIN-OR library that have improved its quality and usability.
    The Sandia and Rutgers team has long supported the goals of open source and the COIN-OR project, and their support has substantially advanced COIN-OR's goal of spreading the use of open-source computational tools in operations research.

July 17, 2006: Logo Contest Winner Announced

    The logo below was the winning logo submitted to our logo contest.
    Congratulations to Seprian Damayanto, who submitted the logo.
    This will become COIN-ORs official logo soon.
    COIN-OR logo

June 19, 2006: The New and Improved COIN-OR

    The COIN-OR Foundation is pleased to announce the release of a collection of enhancements for both users and developers. The new features include:

    • A new wiki-based, open source project management site for each project based on Trac, including
      • A project wiki for the community-based development of documentation and project information.
      • A full-featured source code browser providing a Web interface to the project's repository.
      • A new Wiki-based issue tracking system for users to submit and track trouble tickets for all COIN-OR projects.
    • A new, simplified cross-platform build system based on the GNU autotools.
    • A new, more flexible source code control system, based on Subversion.
    • A new binary distribution system, supporting Linux, Windows and Mac.
    These new features represent a vast leap forward in our ability to serve the quickly growing community of COIN-OR users, but they will take some getting used to in some cases. The two changes most users will notice first are
    • the switch from the CVS source code control system to the newer and more capable subversion, and
    • the adoption of a new automated, cross-platform build system.
    These two upgrades will require some changes to the way users employ the COIN-OR tools (see below), but we hope you will ultimately agree they are a big leap forward for COIN-OR.

    More details on the new features and how they may affect you are provided below. Also, take a look at the newly revised FAQs for a brief overview of the new features and answers to some of the most common questions about how to use them. As you take a look around, feel free to let us know if you are having trouble, either through a post to the appropriate mailing list or by submitting a trouble ticket to one of the COIN-OR projects. In the meantime, we take this opportunity to thank you for your feedback and remind you about the COIN-OR logo contest and the upcoming DIMACS Workshop on COIN-OR. Again, welcome to the new COIN-OR!

    Source Code Control System

    COIN-OR's new source code control system is based on subversion. The old system, based on CVS, will continue to work for the time being, but the CVS repository is now frozen, so no new updates will be available. Future development and bug fixes will be done with the code base in subversion. This means that all CVS users will need to check out a new copy of the source code from the subversion repository in order to continue getting updates. For most users, subversion will function almost identically to CVS, but has many enhancements that are useful for developers. The biggest change users will notice is that each project now has its own, separate repository, so each project will be checked out into its own directory, along with copies of any other COIN-OR projects on which it depends. For a brief overview of the use of subversion and the new build system, please go here. For instructions on getting and building all (or most) COIN-OR projects simultaneously, please go here. For more detailed help with Subversion, see the Subversion Book.

    Wiki-based Project Management System

    Each project now has its own wiki-based project management Web site based on the open source Trac project management software. A list of all the project Web sites is available here. Using the wiki, any user can add documentation or other information to their favorite project's Web site, browse the source code, submit a trouble ticket and more. For instructions on using Trac, please go here. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a Wiki, Wikipedia is perhaps the most famous example.

    Build System

    Many projects now use a new build system based on the GNU autotools, which can make cross-platform compilation much simpler. For users, the most noticeable change will be that projects can now be built in Unix-like environments, including Linux, Windows (with CYGWIN or Msys), and MacOS, using the simple sequence of commands:

      configure
    • make
    • make install
    This is the same build system used by many major open source packages you may have come in contact with. The build system automatically determines what compilers are available on your system, what external libraries are available, and what default options are appropriate. These options can, of course, be overridden by the user on the command line. See the Build Tools Web site for further details.

    On Windows there are now project files for Microsoft Visual Studio Version 7 and 8, in addition to Version 6. See the MSVisualStudio Trac page for further details.

    Binary Distributions

    The new binary distribution system enables users satisfied with the major releases of the main COIN-OR packages to download pre-compiled packages for their platforms, including all required libraries. This feature is currently available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS X. Download instructions can be found on the Coin Binary Distribution Project page.