[Coin-bcpdiscuss] lots of branching compared to other solvers

[Brady Hunsaker]

We have a branch-and-price application developed with BCP.  For some 
testing, we turned column generation off (our code just says no 
favorable columns) and tried to solve.

We found some odd behavior.  BCP cannot solve in a reasonable amount of 
time.  There is lots of branching, but little fathoming.

For comparison, we wrote the instance to an MPS file (through BCP) and 
tried it with other solvers.  Both CBC and CPLEX can solve this file in 
less than a minute.  CPLEX can even solve it relatively quickly if cuts 
and preprocessing are turned off.  Both of them use far fewer nodes than 
BCP; we don't even know how many nodes BCP would use since it keeps going.

Any thoughts to help us?  Does this sound like an error in our BCP 
interface code, or an error in BCP itself, or not an error at all?

Laci, if there's anything we can provide that would help you put us on 
track we would be happy to do so.  Thanks,

Brady