[Coin-discuss] Comments on OSI for CPLEX and Xpress MP

[Brady Hunsaker]

I can't answer your questions about CPLEX and XPRESS MP, but I will
speak to the documentation issue.

On Wed, 2004-05-05 at 08:07, Kish Shen wrote:
<snip>
> Is there some overview documentation for OSI? For exmaple, I had to
> experiment to find out that for solving a MIP problem, I needed to make a
> call to InitialSolve() first. The tutorial at Leihigh University was very
> helpful for the linear problems, but it did not show a MIP problem.
> 

Documentation is one of the areas in which COIN-OR has a great deal of
room for improvement.  I know of no OSI tutorial or guide, such as you
are requesting, though it would certainly help the project.  In general,
I believe the in-code documentation is pretty good, but
tutorials/guides/overviews are mostly either not present or
out-of-date.  In addition, the central location for documentation could
be more user-friendly.  These needs have come up before in COIN-OR
discussions.

I have started making modest efforts to tackle these needs and plan to
announce the effort in the next few weeks.  The first goals will be to
help users know what documentation is already available, including how
to use it (I think doxygen is not very intuitive to a newcomer), and
whether there are known guides/overviews or example code.

It will be up to users and developers for each project to make the
documentation for that project, but a central documentation effort could
help solicit/recruit contributions of the most-needed documentation by
identifying and calling attention to these needs.

In my case, I'm also a user and developer of OSI, so I expect to set an
example by creating a guide and/or tutorial for OSI such as you're
requesting.  If you have specific ideas for things to include, such as
your point about MIPs, then please let me know.  I'll try to get this
off the ground by next week.

Brady

-- 
Brady Hunsaker
Assistant Professor
Industrial Engineering
University of Pittsburgh
http://www.engr.pitt.edu/hunsaker/