[Couenne] COUENNE in matlab

[Pietro Belotti]

Dear Jean-Charles,

at the moment, the only modeling language interface for Couenne is the 
AMPL interface. We are extending it now to accept other formats by using 
the Optimization Services package in COIN-OR 
(https://projects.coin-or.org/OS), but it will take some time. I am not 
sure how to do it in Matlab, but here's one possible way: Couenne accepts 
.nl files that are written by AMPL: if, from AMPL, you give the commands

model mymodel.mod;
data mydata.dat;
write gmyfile;

AMPL will create a file myfile.nl (without the "g") on which you can run 
"couenne myfile.nl" and solve it. Couenne then produces a file myfile.sol 
which contains the optimal solution, and which is once again in an AMPL 
format, but you can just read the last n lines of the file (n is the 
number of variables) as they usually contain the solution to your problem. 
If you are able to write a .nl file from Matlab (see 
http://www.ampl.com/hooking.html), which is not trivial. You should then 
be able then to run Couenne as a shell script from Matlab and read the 
.sol file. I have to say I never tried this as I'm not a Matlab user. If 
you try this, let me know if you have any success.

Also, I would highly appreciate if you could direct all your questions to 
the Couenne mailing list (in CC).

Regards,
Pietro

--
Pietro Belotti
Dept. of Mathematical Sciences
Clemson University
email: pbelott at clemson.edu
phone: 864-656-6765
web:   myweb.clemson.edu/~pbelott

On Fri, 18 Feb 2011, jean-charles bazin wrote:

> Dear Pietro Belotti,
> 
> My name is Jean-Charles Bazin and I work on computer vision. For my research, I am now using COUENNE. I got your contact from https://projects.coin-or.org/Couenne/wiki
> 
> I managed to use couenne from ampl, and it works great!
> My question is the following: is it possible to call couenne directly from matlab?
> Actually I need to run couenne several hundreds of time, so if I could call couenne automatically from matlab and process the outputs directly in matlab, that would be wonderful.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> --
> Jean-Charles BAZIN
> Post-doctoral fellow
> Ikeuchi Laboratory
> University of Tokyo, Japan
> +82-10-7216-6039