(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.

The 2020 COIN-OR Cup was awarded at the foundation’s annual meeting, which took place online on November 16, 2020. The winner of the COIN-OR Cup 2020 is:

“Muriqui Optimizer: An open source solver for convex Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming”

Congratulations to the Muriqui team: Wendel Melo, Marcia Fampa and Fernanda Raup.

Muriqui Optimizer is an open-source solver for convex Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problems. Its development began about 10 years ago with the Master dissertation of Wendel Melo and it is still actively developed today. Muriqui implements a vast number of algorithms from literature (+70,000 lines of code), easing the development of customized algorithms for specific applications. It also provides interfaces to other COIN-OR projects, such as CBC and IPOPT.

In the COIN-OR spirit of reproducible research, new features and computational experiments with this open source-solver were discussed in five papers published in recognized scientific journals.

COIN-OR Cup committee members: Haroldo G. Santos and Samuel S. Brito

In a long-anticipated move, COIN-OR has now completed the process of moving all projects from the old COIN-OR SVN/TRAC server to our organization on Github! Although we have had a presence on Github for a number of years, many projects were still only being mirrored there from our SVN server. It is only recently that the move was completed. There will undoubtedly be a few glitches as we sunset our SVN/TRAC services, but please do mark our new home as your destination for all things COIN-OR!

The 2019 COIN-OR Cup celebration took place at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle on Monday, October 21. The selection committee was co-chaired by last year’s winners, Andreas Lundell and Jan Kronqvist. The 2019 winners are Samuel S. Brito and Haroldo G. Santos of Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil. The citation appears below.

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks for all you do for COIN-OR.

COIN-OR CUP 2019
The annual COIN-OR Cup Prize recognizes and celebrates effective uses of COIN-OR software or valuable contributions to COIN-OR.

As COIN-OR already consists of over 60 open source projects, it is important to not just recognize new projects, but significant improvements to already existing ones as well.

Mixed-Integer Linear programming (MILP) plays a central role in operations research (OR), with a wide variety of applications. The commercial solvers have impressive performances, but to researchers in OR they mainly remain closed. Furthermore, there are several applications where the licenses of the commercial solvers render them economically infeasible. There is, thus, a strong motivation for an efficient open-source MILP solver, and this year’s winner has made a strong contribution to improve the main open-source alternative.
The project captures the spirit of the COIN-OR initiative, and the importance of their work, and the solver, is also highlighted by the fact that it was used in most of the other submissions this year.

With this motivation, the COIN-OR Cup 2019 has been awarded to the submission

Using Conflict Graphs in COIN-OR Branch-and-Cut Solver

submitted by

Samuel S. Brito and Haroldo G. Santos
Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil

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.

The 2017 COIN-OR Cup is awarded to John Chinneck, Mubashsharul
Shafique, and Laurence Smith for their work on the CCGO Global
Optimizer.

In a series of papers, this team developed an improved multi-start
method that can be used to find solutions for nonconvex NLPs. The
methodology is based on an approach called constraint consensus
concentration that attempts to identify disjoint parts of the feasible
region, and then launches a nonlinear solver for each of the disjoint
regions. CCGO relies on a mixture of novel theoretical developments,
heuristics, and algorithm engineering to create a software that
effectively and reliably finds solutions to difficult nonconvex
problems, comparing favorably to existing solvers. The implementation
of CCGO relies on COIN-OR software.

One of the main goals of the COIN-OR Cup is to promote effective use
of COIN-OR software that the community may not know about. The series
of papers nominated by John, Mubashsharul and Laurence is a perfect
example of that, and the prize committee is glad to announce them as
this year’s Cup winners.

Committee members: Andy Conn, Giacomo Nannicini, Thomas Wortmann.