[Couenne] Questions regarding the installation and usage of COUENNE

[Patricio Torres T]

Dear Pietro:

My name is Patricio and I want to solve a MINLP whose objective and
constraints functions are non-convex and factorable (as described in some
of your papers). This is for non-commercial purpouses. I am interested in
solving my problem by using COUENNE, however, I have some doubts on how to
install it and use it (unfortunately I am just a beginner at the usage of
the command line and C++ programming. I am mainly MATLAB user). The
operating system of my machine is mac OSX v10.10.5 (YOSEMITE). I have
downloaded the tarball of COUENNE-0.5.8 and uncompress it in my root
directory. In addition, I have already read the INSTALL.* files of every
subdirectory of Couenne-0.5.8/ThirdParty (ASL, BLAS, HSL, Lapack, Metis,
Mumps, SCIP and SoPlex) (as specified in the installation part of the user
manual of COUENNE).

1) For ASL: I have downloaded the solvers.tgz file form netlib, however, in
the webpage it says that the file does not contain the lib items located at
the end of the page (apparently those are required for invoking different
solvers from AMPL). Should I download them as well or is it enough with
this tar file? if so, in what directory should I put them? How should I
build every one? (I have seen the README file at the web directory but I
hardly understand what I should do). Moreover, in the INSTALL.ASL file it
says that I should put the uncompressed folder "solvers" at the
directory: $SRCROOTDIR/OTHERS/ASL. What does it mean this? I do not have a
directory with that name in my computer or Does it refer to the
directory: Couenne-0.5.8/ThirdParty/ASL?

2) For BLAS: Should I rename the folder "BLAS-3.8.0" to "blas" (after
uncompress it in the directory Couenne-0.5.8/ThirdParty/BLAS)? Note that
this step does not appear in the instructions, but for other solvers is
necessary to rename.

3) For HSL: Is it enough with uncompressing and renaming
the coinhsl-x.y.z.tar.gz file at the Couenne-0.5.8/ThirdParty/HSL directory
or should I do something else (there is other instructions for compiling it
with IPOPT)?

4) For LAPACK: Is it enough with uncompressing and renaming
the lapack-3.2.1.tgz file at the Couenne-0.5.8/ThirdParty/Lapack directory
or should I install it as well? How should I run the configure script in
this case and what steps should I follow?

5) For SCIP: At the webpage of SCIP it says that it could be necessary to
install Bliss-0.73 to perform some computations faster (Backtrack search).
For installing Bliss should I also install GMP (GNU Multiple Precision
Arithmetic Library <http://gmplib.org/>)? Is all of this necessary for
running COUENNE properly?

In a general context:

Should I compile and build every package (ASL, BLAS, HSL, Lapack, Metis,
Mumps, SCIP and SoPlex) separately or everything will be fine if I just
configure, make and install COUENNE with the commands given in the user
manual (after download and place every package where it corresponds as
pointed out in every INSTALL.* file at the ThirdParty subdirectory)?

In my case, Is it necessary to install IPOPT? How should i do this?

Should I install Xcode?

Should I install the gcc and fortran compilers before building COUENNE
(apparently this can be done from homebrew or are they included in Xcode)?

Is there an interface for MATLAB where I can use COUENNE as a solver (I
think there is one for IPOPT)?

Should I download AMPL separately to use COUENNE or can I use it without
AMPL (In the manual it says that COUENNE can works as an stand alone solver
as well but I do not know if there is an interface to enter my instance
directly as a stand alone separated programming language)? Is there a
manual for using COUENNE as a stand alone solver?

I am sorry for bothering you with my long questions (maybe some of them are
just trivial stuff for you)

Thank you very much in advance for your time and for your patience!!

Patricio
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