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.

COIN-OR AGM Attendees

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.

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.

The 2016 COIN-OR Cup is awarded to Giacomo Nannicini (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center) and Thomas Wortmann (Singapore University of Technology and Design) for their contributions to model-based optimization for architectural design. The twelfth annual cup was awarded based on the RBFOpt and Opossum packages developed by the awardees.

RBFOpt has been in COIN-OR since 2015 and is a python library for blackbox global optimization in settings where the objective function is computationally expensive to evaluate. Opossum is a plugin for Grasshopper — a generative design language popular among architectural designers — that provides a GUI to RBFOpt.

This year’s committee commended the awardees for their simultaneous valuable contribution to COIN-OR and effective use of COIN-OR software. By lowering the barrier to entry, RBFOpt and Opossum are bringing state-of-the-art optimization to new communities and exciting classes of problems.

This year’s Cup was awarded at a celebration at the Flying Saucer in Nashville, Tennessee, during the INFORMS Annual Meeting.

2016 COIN-OR Cup Committee:

• Joey Huchette, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Jeffrey Linderoth, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Miles Lubin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Stefan Wild (chair), Argonne National Laboratory

Announcing the twelfth annual “COIN-OR Cup” competition, sponsored by the COIN-OR Foundation.

Guidelines:
* A submission or nomination must contain:
1. a synopsis of an effective use of COIN-OR or valuable contribution to COIN-OR (or both!),
2. an explanation of its significance.

* The winner must accept the prize in person at the 2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting so we can all celebrate appropriately (see “Celebration” below).

* Submission deadline: Friday, October 14th, 2016.

* Self-nominations are welcome.

* We especially encourage nominations of effective use of COIN-OR that the community may not know about.

Celebration: The 2016 COIN-OR Cup will be awarded at a celebration during the INFORMS Annual meeting in Nashville, TN. All entrants, their supporters, and other interested parties are welcome to join the celebration and regale, rile, and roast the prize winners. The celebration will take place Monday, November 14, 7:30 pm at the Flying Saucer, 111 10th Ave. S. 310, Nashville TN 37203. Details of the
winning entry will be announced at this celebration event, and posted on the COIN-OR Cup website. Please e-mail your submissions to coin-cup@
coin-or.org.

Details of the winning entry will be announced at this celebration event, and posted on the COIN-OR Cup website
https://www.coin-or.org/coinCup
Please e-mail your submissions to coin-cup at coin-or.org.

2016 COIN-OR Cup Committee:
Stefan Wild (chair), Argonne National Laboratory
Joey Huchette, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jeffrey Linderoth, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Miles Lubin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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.