Author Archives: Andrew Mason

Congratulations to Robin Lougee, Coin-OR co-founder, for winning the INFORMS Computing Society Distinguished Service Award for 2024. To quote the award announcement: “Robin was a co-creator of the Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR) initiative, which was established in 2004 as a strategic partner of the INFORMS Computing Society (ICS). The goal of the COIN-OR initiative is to accelerate the development and adoption of open-source software for computational operations research, a major goal of ICS itself. She was co-recipient of the 2014 INFORMS Impact Prize for this effort, which has been of major benefit to ICS.”

Well done, Robin; it is fantastic to see your contributions over so many years being acknowledged.

COIN-OR Strategic Leadership Board

Thanks to everyone for coming along to our COIN-OR AGM and joining in our deliberations. (We had a few more join after our official photo below.) You can find our 2021 Annual Report here.

(coming soon)

The 2021 COIN-OR AGM will be held via Zoom on Wed 3 Nov 2021 at 4:00pm Eastern Time (US & Canada). We have provided the Zoom link via our COIN-OR mailing list. If you do not have access to this, and want to attend our AGM, please email secretary@coin-or.org

Nominations are solicited for candidates for up to three director positions
on the Strategic Leadership Board (SLB) and one director position on
the Technical Leadership Council (TLC). All positions are for three
-year terms. Any interested individual is eligible to be a director of
the Foundation.

COIN-OR is evolving rapidly, and directors can have a significant
influence on the development of the Foundation. Candidates should have
an active interest in COIN-OR and be committed to active participation
in SLB and TLC business. For more information on the activities of and
expectations for directors, prospective candidates are encouraged to
contact any of the current directors or the Foundation Secretary (
secretary@coin-or.org).

Up to three directors will be elected to the SLB. Note that membership in
COIN-OR is not required; in fact, one of the open positions is reserved
for a non-member. Candidates with expertise in the software industry or
experience as a director for a non-profit organization will be eagerly
welcomed.

Up to one director will be elected to the TLC. Membership in COIN-OR
is not required.

The Foundation encourages the nomination of any interested individuals,
and particularly users of COIN-OR software, who have not previously
been active participants in COIN-OR projects. Diversity of viewpoint
and skills is both needed and appreciated.

For all director positions, a candidate may be nominated by any
interested individual. Self-nomination is allowed. All nominations
must be seconded by a full member of the Foundation.

Nominations should be emailed to the Secretary (secretary@coin-or.org)
and will be accepted until October 6, 2021. Candidates must agree
to be nominated and will be contacted to provide a short biography and
statement to be distributed to the full members of the Foundation prior
to the election.

More information on the COIN-OR foundation can be found at
https://www.coin-or.org/about-the-foundation/

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS: 17th annual “COIN-OR Cup” competition sponsored
by the COIN-OR Foundation.

The COIN-OR Cup recognizes and celebrates the best contributions to
open source operations research software development and use
associated with the COIN-OR software collection. To remind you,
COIN-OR stands for “COmputational INfrastructure for OPerations
Research”. It is the definitive collection of free open source
operations research software that lets you concentrate on your
research instead of re-implementing software. See
https://www.coin-or.org. Get on board!

GUIDELINES FOR COIN-OR CUP SUBMISSIONS:

A submission or nomination must contain:
1. A synopsis of an effective use of COIN-OR or valuable contribution
to COIN-OR (or both!), including an explanation of its significance.
Maximum 3 pages (pdf format).
2. Copies of relevant papers or documents (pdf format).
We especially encourage nominations describing effective use of
COIN-OR that the community may not know about.
Self-nominations are welcome and encouraged.

Submission deadline: Friday, October 3, 2021.

Please e-mail your submissions to coin-cup@coin-or.org in a single
zipped archive, containing a description of your submission and copies
of all relevant papers/documents in pdf format.

The winner is normally announced and celebrated during the INFORMS
annual meeting. Due to travel uncertainty, the winner may instead
be announced online at the COIN-OR general meeting; details for the
announcement and celebration will be revealed when available.

We are pleased to announce that Andreas Lundell, Jan Kronqvist, and Tapio Westerlun from Finland have won the 2018 COIN-OR Cup for their work on “The Supporting Hyperplane Optimization Toolkit” (Shot), a new COIN-OR solver for MINLP (Mixed Integer Non-linear Programs). You can read about this solver at optimization-online.org, find the code at the COIN-OR GitHub site, and view the celebration on twitter.

All COIN-OR members are invited to participate to the general meeting that will take place on March 21st, 3:30PM EST (estimated duration: one hour).
The meeting will take place online via Zoom. Instructions to join are
given below. The Agenda is below.

The meeting serves several purposes.
1) Discussion of strategy for the upcoming year.
2) Discussion of the latest annual report: https://projects.coin-or.org/Events/wiki/AnnualReport2017
3) Installation of officers.
4) General discussion and feedback with board members.

Please join if your schedule allows!

How to join the Zoom teleconference:
Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://auckland.zoom.us/j/763149997

Or Telephone:
Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location):
New Zealand: +64 (0) 9 801 1188 or +64 (0) 4 831 8959
United States: +1 646 558 8656, +1 669 900 6833
Meeting ID: 763 149 997
International numbers available:
https://auckland.zoom.us/zoomconference?m=WFp0u8nITUcuYs0vwSKRks6QJZABgcPF

Agenda Items
1) Election of officers. President: Matthew Saltzman. Secretary: Giacomo Nannicini. Treasurer: TBA.
2) Discussion of the latest annual report: https://projects.coin-or.org/Events/wiki/AnnualReport2017
3) Consideration of the updated mission statement below.
4) General discussion and feedback with board members.

Proposed New Mission Statement:
The mission of the COIN-OR Foundation, Inc., is to create and disseminate knowledge related to all aspects of computational operations research. To accomplish this mission, the Foundation will:

• Promote and support community-driven development of open-source software that exploits state-of-the-art research in OR;
• Develop and deploy an academic peer review process and forum for publication and citation of open-source software for OR;
• Facilitate the sharing of OR technology among scholars and practitioners;
• Increase community awareness and use of software tools published by the Foundation;
• Support the establishment of open standards for data interchange and software interoperability.

COIN-OR AGM Attendees

There’s a great overview of software available for optimisation in Optima (volume 103, 2017), the Mathematical Optimization Society Newsletter, including the article “A Lightning Tour of the Optimization, Modeling Software Landscape” written by COIN-OR’s chair Matthew Saltzman. This newsletter also includes a good tutorial for COIN-OR’s PuLP, written by its developer (and optimisation guru/consultant) Stu Mitchell.