<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">COIN-OR E-News Announcements <br>
September 2005 - Volume 1 - Issue 1 </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica"><br>
Contents: <br>
0. Inaugural Members Newsletter </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">1. Call for Nominations: Directors,
COIN-OR Foundation <br>
2. COIN-OR INFORMS 2005 Cup Competition <br>
3. Open for New Projects</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">4. New Projects on COIN-OR</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">5. COIN-OR on a New Server <br>
6. Recent Conference Activity <br>
7. INFORMS Annual Meeting 2005, San Francisco</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">8. COIN-OR Article to Appear in
ORMS Today</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">9. Corporate Members Welcome<br>
10. Project News<br>
______________ <br>
<br>
0. Inaugural Members Newsletter <br>
Welcome to the inaugural COIN-OR Foundation Newsletter. The Newsletter
is an exclusive benefit for Members of the COIN-OR Foundation, published
quasi-quarterly throughout the year. </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica"><br>
1. Call for Nominations: Directors, COIN-OR Foundation<br>
Elections for Directors of the COIN-OR Foundation will be held this November.
Nominations are solicited for candidates for two director positions on
the Strategic Leadership Board (SLB) and two director positions on the
Technical Leadership Council (TLC). All full members of the Foundation
are eligible to vote. Visit </font><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica">http://www.coin-or.org/call.for.nominations.2005.html
for details.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">2. COIN-OR INFORMS 2005 Cup Competition
</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">Announcing the most coveted prize in
computational OR! For details on how to enter a submission or nominate
a worthy COIN-OR user/contributor (or to attend the award ceremony at the
INFORMS Annual Meeting), see http://www.coin-or.org/coinCup05.html.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">3. Open for New Projects </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">When the COIN-OR Foundation took over
active management of the COIN-OR initiative at the end of 2004, a moratorium
was placed on accepting new projects while formal policies and procedures
were established. In May 2005, the official processes were posted at </font><a><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica">http://www.coin-or.org/contributions.html</font></a><font size=2 face="Helvetica">
and COIN-OR was re-opened to accept new projects. Trac (</font><a><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica">http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/</font></a><font size=2 face="Helvetica">)
was selected as COIN-OR's new project management system and Subversion
(</font><a><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica">http://subversion.tigris.org/</font></a><font size=2 face="Helvetica">)
was selected as the new version control system. Both Trac and Subversion
are themselves open-source projects. All new projects will use Trac
and Subversion. Old projects can have Trac pages (which is highly recommended
in order to take advantage of the issue tracker and the Wiki) and can convert
from CVS to Subversion (also recommended due to advantages of Subversion
over CVS and because the Trac source browser is Subversion based).</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">4. New Projects: CppAD, coinMP.dll, FLopC++,
and MINLP.</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(A) CppAD </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">You may have noticed a new project in
the nightly tarballs, namely CppAD. CppAD was contributed by Brad Bell
(</font><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>http://www.seanet.com/~bradbell/</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">)
and is the process of coming on board. What is CppAD? The step-by-step
conversion of floating point operations from an algorithm that computes
function values to an algorithm that computes derivative values is known
as Algorithmic Differentiation. (For more information about Algorthmic
Differentiation, often called Automatic Differentiation or just “AD”,
and other AD software see </font><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>http://www.autodiff.org/</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">.)
Given a C++ algorithm that computes function values, CppAD records the
floating point operations and can then use this recording to compute derivatives
of arbitrary order using both “forward” and “reverse” mode. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">Three new projects are in the pipeline
and will be on COIN-OR by the INFORMS meeting in November. </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(B) coinMP.dll </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">The coinMP.dll is contributed by Bjarni
Kristjansson (Maximal Software). CoinMP.dll is a Windows dynamic linked
library (DLL) that supports most of the functionality of COIN-OR LP, COIN-OR
Branch-and-Cut and Cut Generation Library projects. This coinMP.dll
distribution of the COIN-OR projects for Windows has the advantages of
being: high portability, does not require any compilation, easy to use,
and can be used from any other Windows application. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(C) FlopC++</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">The FlopC++ project is contributed by
Tim Hultberg (EUMETSAT). FLOPC++ is an algebraic modeling language
embedded in C++. The goals of FLOPC++ are: </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica"> - to be as robust, efficient and
easy to use, for linear optimization, as, traditional algebraic modeling
languages, such as AMPL and GAMS,</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica"> - to facilitate the integration
of optimization models in software applications,</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica"> - to facilitate the efficient implementation
of model-tailored solution algorithms, and </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica"> - to remain lightweight.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(C) MINLP </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">The MINLP project is contributed by Larry
Biegler, Pierre Bonami, Gerard Cornuejols, Ignacio Grossman, Carl Laird,
Francois Margot, and Nick Sawaya (CMU) with Andrew Conn, Jon Lee, Andrea
Lodi, and Andreas Waechter (IBM). The goal of this project is to produce
novel open-source software for solving mixed-integer nonlinear programs
(MINLP) with convex relaxation. The MINLP solver uses other COIN-OR packages
as building blocks, namely, CBC, CLP, and IPOPT.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">5. COIN-OR on a New Server</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">COIN-OR now lives on a server of its
own at the INFORMS offices. Thank you INFORMS! </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">6. Recent Conference Activity</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">Have you given a talk about your application,
research, or teaching related to COIN-OR? We want to know. Send us a link
or your presentation. Check out these recent COIN-OR sightings at sightings.
</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(A) MOPTA 2005</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">- Plenary presented by Brenda Dietrich
</font><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>http://www.coin-or.org/Presentations/COIN-OR.MOPTA.2005.pdf</u></font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(B) IFORS 2005</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">-- “CoinMP: Simple C-API Windows DLL
implementation of CLP, CBC, and CGL” at IFORS05 by Bjarni Krisstjansson.</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">-- “Using Cyberinfrastructure
for Computational Operations Research” by Jeff Linderoth, </font>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica">http://coral.ie.lehigh.edu/presentations/ifors-05-cyberor-handout.pdf</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">-- “How to Publish Your Code on
COIN-OR” by Robin Lougee-Heimer, </font><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica">http://www.coin-or.org/documentation.html#general</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">7. INFORMS Annual Meeting 2005, San Francisco</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">Many COIN-OR related events are planned
for the INFORMS Annual Meeting, including the member & user meeting,
election, 1st COIN-OR Cup celebration, talks, tutorial on CBC, and a booth
in the exhibit hall (thanks to a generous donation by INFORMS, which hopefully
won't be affected by the move to San Francisco). Checkout </font><a><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica">http://www.coin-or.org/informs05.html</font></a><font size=2 face="Helvetica">
for details. To keep abreast of other conferences where COIN-OR events
are known to be happening, see the Events page at </font><a><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica">http://www.coin-or.org/events.html</font></a><font size=2 face="Helvetica">.
</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">8. COIN-OR Article to Appear in ORMS
Today</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">An article describing the accomplishments
of the COIN-OR open-source community in 2005 will appear in pre-annual
meeting issue of ORMS Today. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">9. Corporate Members Welcome</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">Does your company support the mission
of the COIN-OR Foundation? Or benefit from the no-cost open-source tools
made available through COIN-OR? Give back. How? (i) Let us know how your
using COIN-OR. Your feedback helps us keep a good thing going. (ii)
Make a corporate donation. Become a corporate member of the COIN-OR Foundation.
Email info at coin-or.org for more details. </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica"><br>
10. Project News (in alphabetical order)<br>
</font><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>ALPS</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
Abstract Library for Parallel Search</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">ALPS is a C++ class library and framework
for implementing scalable parallel tree search algorithms. This library
has been under development for several years and should have its first
full public release later this year. Current development efforts are focused
on BiCePS and BLIS, the data layers built on top of ALPS that are needed
to implement a full-blown parallel branch, cut, and price solver.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>BCP</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
Branch-Cut-Price Framework</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">Users now have the ability to use the
Message Passing Interface (MPI) parallel processing communication protocol
with BCP, thanks to an interface contributed by Sonya Marcarelli (University
of Benevento) and Igor Vasil’ev (Institute of System Dynamics and Control
Theory of Russian Academy of Sciences).</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>CBC</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
COIN-OR Branch and Cut </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica"> As Cbc is used more and becomes
more robust, its version number is creeping towards 1.0 and is now at 0.95.
CBC users may be interested in two developments. (i) For Cbc,
some work has been done on improving the search, especially the choice
of variable to branch on. The ideas are from various papers including
one by Achterberg, Koch and Martin. The modifications are switched
on by a non zero value for model.setNumberBeforeTrust() which computes
up and down estimates using strong branching until a variable has been
branched on a reasonable number of times. For the miplib test set
John Forrest (IBM) found setNumberBeforeTrust(5) and setNumberStrong(5)
gave reasonable results, but more testing is needed. (ii) It has
been suggested that the heuristics be separated out so that they can work
with any OsiSolverInterface. This may take a bit of work -- is it
worthwhile? Let John know by writing to him at coin-discuss@list.coin-or.org.
In keeping with the C'ness of Cbc, the heuristics would go into Chl
(Coin Heuristic Library).</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>CGL</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
Cut Generator Library </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">A report on the implementation of the
CglMixedIntegerRounding cut generator was published by the Joao Goncalves
and Laszlo Ladanyi (IBM). See </font><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>http://www.coin-or.org/documentation.html#CGL</u></font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>CLP</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
COIN-OR LP, a simplex solver </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">CLP Project Manager, John Forrest, has
been asked to develop a single Clp/Coin library which should be as small
as possible. A tarball will be created which can give users full
Simplex functionality including presolve and MPS I/O but which can also
be configured to give a small library. Users may notice more conditional
compilation in Coin and Clp and the possibility of omitting any reference
to CoinPackedVector etc. This will be a slow but continuous process
which should not break anything but if users notice anything odd when doing
things like adding rows or columns please tell John at coin-lpsolver@list.coin-or.org.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>Coin</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
COIN-OR utilities library </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">Utility functions for the CoinPackedMatrix
and the CoinPackedVector classes, including a sorted, sparse, dot-product
method, were added to enable the developers of PICO (<u>http://software.sandia.gov/Acro/PICO</u>)
at Sandia National Labs to use the OSI and the CGL. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>DFO</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
Derivative-Free Optimization, a package for solving general nonlinear optimization
problems when derivatives are unavailable </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(A) DFO was used to solve optimization
problems in a recent technical report of Middle Eastern Technical University:
M. Schaefer, B. Karasozen , Y. Uludag , K. Yapici, O. Ugur, Numerical Method
for Optimizing Stirrer Configurations, 2005</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(B) A theoretical paper,"Geometry
of Sample Sets in Derivative Free Optimization. Part II: Polynomial Regression
and Underdetermined Interpolation" by A. R. Conn, K. Scheinberg and
L. N. Vicentehas just appeared in Optimization Online. </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(C) The predecessor, "Geometry
of Sample Sets in Derivative Free Optimization. Part I: Polynomial Interpolation"
by A. R. Conn, K. Scheinberg and L. N. Vicenteis under review in Mathematical
programming.</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(D) A semiplenary presentation based
in these two papers was given by Katya Scheinberg (IBM) in July at the
FOCM'05 meeting in Santander, Spain.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>dylp</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
Dynamic LP </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">Lou Hafer (Simon Fraser University) has
commit to migrating dylp to the new project management system (Trac/Subversion),
complete with updated in-depth documentation, by the INFORMS meeting in
November.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>IPOPT</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
Interior Point OPTimizer for general large-scale nonlinear optimization
</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(A) Carl Laird (CMU) visited IBM as a
summer student for the second time this year, working with Andreas Waechter
to release the new C++ version of IPOPT. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(B) Steinar Hauan (CMU) announced a "public
beta" version of a Matlab MEX interface to IPOPT written by Claas
Michalik (at RWTH Achen) and himself. Users can download a copy from Steniar's
MEX file web page, </font><a href="http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/steinhau/Research/mex-interfaces.html"><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/steinhau/Research/mex-interfaces.html</u></font></a><font size=2 face="Helvetica">.
The current MEX interface is written for the "old" Fortran version
of IPOPT, but will be updated for the C++ version when it is available.<br>
<br>
</font><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>Multifario</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
a continuation method for computing implicitly defined manifolds </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">Multifario is a set of subroutines and
data structures for computing manifolds that occur in Dynamical Systems.
Fixed points, periodic orbits, heteroclinic and homoclinic connections,
and many types of singular motions have been formulated as solutions of
systems of parameterized algebraic or two point boundary value problems.
</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>NLPAPI</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
Nonlinear Programming Application Programming Interface</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">NLPAPI is a set of subroutines and data
structures for defining nonlinear programming problems. It includes an
interface to call LANCELOT to solve the problem (you need to get your own
copy of LANCELOT). </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>OSI</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
Open Solver Interface </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(A) Routines to read and write files
in an LP format were contributed by Francois Margot (Carnegie Mellon University)
and integrated by Matthew Saltzman (Clemson University). Every solver with
an OSI has the ability to read and write the contributed LP format. The
new format is a narrative description, not unlike formats used by commercial
LP solvers.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(B) Utilities for operations in the OsiRowCut
class that have vector and a scalar as arguments were contributed by Bill
Hart and Cynthia Phillips (Sandia National Labs), and Jonathan Eckstein
(Rutgers University).</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(C) All OSIs now permit multiple inheritance,
at the request of the PICO developers. Multiple inheritance is a
C++ feature that gives increased flexibility in the way OSI can be used.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(D) A new version of the XPRESS solver
interface (rev. 1.11) has been pushed to CVS by Matthew Saltzman. This
revision fixes several issues related to the OSI unit test, including:
tracking constant objective offsets, returning NULL for empty rim vectors,
interaction with CoinPresolve. Other issues fixed: compiles warning-free
with gcc4, properly returns MIP solution after branchAndBound(), some internals,
and a few issues remain (mostly the DeSmet test units). The unitTest runs
to completion without crashing.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">(E) There is a new mailing list for developers
and maintainers of the COIN-OR Open Solver Interface. If you are
an OSI developer or maintainer and are interested in contributing to discussions
related to design of the OSI, you can subscribe to the coin-osi-devel list
at </font><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>http://list.coin-or.org/mailman/listinfo/coin-osi-devel</u></font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>OTS</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
Open Tabu Search </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">OTS is a java tabu search framework that
helps developers implement tabu search meta-heuristics in a well-defined,
object-oriented design. The OTS project is run by Rob Harder (USAF), who
welcomes feedback on people working with OTS. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>SMI</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
Stochastic Modeling Interface, for optimization under uncertainty </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">Thanks to the many eyes of the open-source
community, the Stochastic Modeling Interface (SMI) code has continued to
evolve<b> </b>the OSI-compatible Stochastic MPS reader. Join the SMI discussion
by subscribing to the new coin-smi list at <u>http://list.coin-or.org/mailman/listinfo/coin-osi-devel</u>.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>SYMPHONY</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
A callable library for solving mixed-integer linear programs </font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">Over the past two years, SYMPHONY has
received several major upgrades, including the development of a C callable
library interface and an associated OSI wrapper class, the addition of
an interactive command shell, and the addition of a number of experimental
features, such as the ability to solve multi-criteria MILPs, the ability
to warm start the solution procedure, and the ability to perform basic
sensitivity analyses. SYMPHONY's parallel execution mode has also been
overhauled recently. A beta version of version 5.1 containing all of the
above features is currently available in the COIN-OR repository. Under
development for version 5.1 are an integer pre-solver and new primal heuristics.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>VOL</u></font><font size=2 face="Helvetica">:
Volume Algorithm</font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica">A paper describing the use of the volume
algorithm to obtain near-optimal solutions to large-scale facility locations
problem by F. Barahona and F. Chudak is available from Science Direct at
</font><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica"><u>http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B7GWV-4FJTP69-2&_coverDate=03%2F30%2F2005&_alid=303213310&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_cdi=20468&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=e4bcb292627ffb210ce82763cefcb6da</u></font>
<br><font size=2 face="Helvetica"><br>
------------------------------------------------- <br>
COIN-OR is powered by volunteers. Want to get (more) involved? See </font><a><font size=2 color=blue face="Helvetica">http://www.coin-or.org/how-to-help.html</font></a><font size=2 face="Helvetica">.
Or contact us by email: info@coin-or.org. This is an informational
posting sent to members of COIN-OR Foundation. To remove yourself from
this list, visit http://list.coin-or.org/mailman/options/coin-members.
News items for the next edition should be sent to info@coin-or.org.</font>