IMA COIN-OR Workshop: COIN fORgery 2018

COIN-OR is pleased to announce COIN fORgery, a workshop to be held at the IMA (Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications) October 15-19, 2018 in Minneapolis, MN, USA.  We welcome all members of the broader COIN-OR community to this workshop focused on the development of software in the COIN-OR repository of open source software for Operations Research. The goal is to bring together the community of existing and future developers, users, packagers, and other interested parties for a combination of tutorials, technical talks, and hands-on sessions leading to proposals for later intensive “coding sprints.” A running theme will be the future of COIN-OR and how to put it on a sustainable track. The focus of the workshop will be primarily on the tools in the COIN-OR Optimization Suite.

The general structure of the workshop will be to have tutorials and/or technical talks in the mornings, optional topical discussion at lunch for those who are interested, and hands-on breakout sessions in the afternoon. Each day will have a theme and will be lead by a different member of the COIN-OR community.

Overall Goals

  • Give participants a good overall view of where COIN-OR is today, where work is needed, what the challenges are, and how they can contribute.
  • Get participants quickly to hands-on exercises where they can make a contribution.
  • “Energize the base” to continue participating and contributing post-workshop.
  • Develop proposals for and organize teams for coding sprints.
  • Develop strategies for long-term sustainability.

Target Audience

  • End users/packagers/integrators, including those wanting to use our libraries and modelling tools.
  • Current COIN-OR developers who want to learn more.
  • Developers of new projects wanting to use our (build) tools.
  • People interested in the internals of our tools so they can extend/improve them.

Daily Themes

  • Monday: Intro, build system, development
  • Tuesday: Documentation, unit testing, continuous integration
  • Wednesday: Python integration
  • Thursday: APIs, Generic interfaces
  • Friday: Research challenges, sustainability, future plans

Organizers

For a list of participants, please see  the IMA workshop site.

Tentative Schedule

(For the latest schedule, please see the IMA workshop site.)

Time Morning Lunch Afternoon
Monday
  • Welcome
  • Goals of Workshop
  • Intro to COIN-OR
  • Software publication
 Tutorials

  • Infrastructure
  • Build system
  • Continuous integration
  • Git/Github

Hands on with Github migration
Tuesday Tutorials

  • Documentation
  • Unit testing
  • Test-driven development
  • Continuous Integration
  • Web site
  • GDPR
 Breakout Groups

  • Documentation
  • Unit testing: Python and C++
  • Build System

Reports from breakout groups
Wednesday Tutorials

  • Python bindings
  • Licensing
 Breakout groups

  • Developing Python bindings
Thursday
  • Reports from breakout groups
  • OSI, CGL
  • Generic interfaces
  • Optimization suite
  • Future of the foundation
  • Sustainability
  • Sponsorship
 Breakout groups

  • Bug squashing
  • Clean up bugs in TRAC and move important ones to Github issues
  • Web-site bug squashing
Friday
  • Panel: Research Software Challenges
  • Sustainability
  • Reports from breakout groups
  • Proposals for coding sprints
  • Future of Clp/Cbc

We are very grateful to the IMA for supporting this workshop both with their organisational expertise and also through some contributions towards accommodation and/or travel.