[Coin-discuss] [ private industry optimization project: developing MATLAB links for COIN-OR ]

[Carlos Martínez]

Hi,

My name is Carlos and I work as an OR engineer for a privately funded
industry leader in the energy market in Spain.

It has been a long time since I started working with FOSS -OSs and tools-
and wherever I go I always try to bring my personal preferences with me and
it is now the case that I am in a position such that I can take decisions on
some important projects that are being developed in our company.

I spent some time reading about COIN-OR and the projects that I am interested
in, mostly those that have to do with linear mixed integer programming (CBC,
BCP and SYMPHONY) and I am looking forward to use them in those projects
in which I can make the decision on which tools to use to solve our models.

It is somehow difficult to understand what is the current status of the projects
since the documentation is not always up-to-date and some times it is also
reduced to that provided automatically by Doxygen. So I have some questions
that I could not answer neither browsing your site, reading the FAQs,
nor browsing
the structure of the projects:

(1) The first and most important is the following: I have only found MATLAB
interfaces for IPOPT and I could not find any documentation nor examples
of work done trying to link CBC / BCP or SYMPHONY to MATLAB. Maybe
you find it useless but in my project set-up it is simply necessary.

(1.a) Is there any work done in this direction that I couldn't find?
(1.b) I have already started developing MATLAB .mex files to interface with
COIN-OR tools, and I would discard this work if the answer to the former
question were "yes", but otherwise, would anyone be interested in my work
to be included as examples in their projects? I can also write some good
documentation about the MATLAB links I will be developing as well.


(2) What would your informed opinion be about these options?
(2.a) OSI vs OS
(2.b) SYMPHONY vs BCP

Best regards,


--
Carlos Martinez Belinchon
carlos.martinez at ieee.org