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:
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:
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.
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.
Join us as we celebrate this year’s winner of the COIN-OR Cup, the most coveted prize in computational Operations Research. This year’s celebration will take place Monday November 2nd at The Fieldhouse, 1150 Filbert St, just steps from the Marriott. The celebration begins at 8:30 pm!
As is traditional, we will have a Members and Users meeting during the lunch break on Monday November 2nd, 12:30 pm — 1:30 pm, in Marriott – Franklin 9, Level 4. Anyone interested in open-source software tools, open standards, or data and model repositories for any aspect of operations research is encouraged to attend. Bring your own lunch and ideas.
Visit the Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research booth (#10) to learn about high-quality, free, open-source tools for OR professionals and students, suitable for commercial, educational, and personal use. COIN-OR is the place to go when you need a ‘white box’ for algorithm research and development. We do binaries, too! We’re around the side, near the Career Centre.
Already familiar with COIN-OR and looking for something to do for half an hour til the next talk? Volunteers are always welcome to “staff the booth.” The COIN-OR booth is a great place to network with other COIN-OR community members, colleagues, and random members of the public.
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.