[Coin-standards] An argument for public domain modeling infrastructure

[Alan King]

I think the last point in Irv's message is the most important.  A new
modeling standard will be useful only if a significant part of it is in the
public domain.  The problem with AMPL, GAMS etc etc is that their
respective developer communities are kept artificially small by nature of
the licensing.   Developing new features has to have a strong business
model, which is very difficult in such a low revenue field like
optimization.  So progress grinds to a halt.

I suspect that the pace of new features in AMPL and GAMS and any of the
other proprietary modeling languages is probably one new major (like
nonlinear, stochastic, NL files, etc) feature per decade.  For instance,
Stochastic-MPS standard has been published since 1987 (ie 15 years) and no
modeling language has incorporated it.

Any arguments?  Do we believe that this represents a reasonable pace of
progress for our field?

Alan King
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/k/kingaj/
Mathematical Sciences Department
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
(914) 945-1236, 8-862-1236