[Cbc] Using CBC as a primal heuristic solver

[Fei Peng]

Hi,

I'm new to using CBC, and what I'm trying to do might be a little 
different from most:

I have a branch-and-price solver that I coded up for my mip problem, 
from which I'll get various fractional and integer solutions at 
different nodes. I'd like to use Cbc and its general purpose primal 
heuristics (e.g. feasibility pump and RINS) to try and find feasible 
integer solutions to my problem, but I don't want to use Cbc to solve 
the full problem for me (b/c its too big and slow and that's the reason 
I'm solving it with B&P).

I can give the full problem to cbc, invoke it and run a number of 
heuristics at the root node (and maybe a number of additional nodes), 
however, is there  a way to pass a fractional/integer solution to cbc, 
and have it run some heuristics just with that solution (e.g. feaspump 
for fractional and RINS for integer)? I'm not sure if 
sethotstart/setbestsolution already does that (the reference page is 
rather vague) but my guess is that a feasible integer sol passed to cbc 
is used as a new upper bound but not anything else? Please advise

Thanks much!
Fei