COIN-OR News

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

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

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:
• CHiPPS (ALPS/BiCePS/BLIS)
• CoinUtils
• Osi
• Cgl
• Clp
• BuildTools
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.

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.