[GAMSlinks] GAMSlinks stable revision 0.3 released

[Stefan Vigerske]

Dear COIN-OR users and developers,

I'm happy to announce that, after revision 0.2 was released 9 month
ago, the new GAMSlinks stable revision 0.3 has just been "born".
A new release 0.3.0 will be made as soon as there is a new Bonmin
release. Currently GAMSlinks/stable/0.3 uses the Bonmin pre-stable
version 0.9.

The new features are:

A GAMS interface to the COIN-OR MINLP solver Bonmin has been added.

The CBC and GLPK interfaces have been overworked and the GamsModel class
(for the handling of LPs and MIPs from GAMS) extended.
GAMS/CBC should now offer similar features and performance as the CBC
standalone binary and supports all GAMS special features for MIPs.
GAMS/GLPK should also offer similar performance as the GLPK standalone
binary, especially due to the use of GLPKs advanced B&B solver.

The new GAMS/OSI is a (not much tested) GAMS interface for
OSI-compatible solvers. It is intended to be easily extendable for any
LP or MIP solver with an OSI. Thus, it does not bring all the comfort of
a solver-specific interface, esp. w.r.t. parameter. Currently it brings
support for DyLP, Vol, and SYMPHONY.

New supported platforms are Solaris 10.0 on 64bit-x86
architectures and Darwin on 32bit-x86
architectures. Support for Darwin on PowerPC has been stopped.

The installation has been simplified:
A new build system for GLPK integrates the build of GLPK into the
GAMSlinks build (alike other third party projects).
Only one patch file (for OsiGlpk) should be applied to fix some minor
bugs (see Osi tickets 38 and 41) and to add features to give more 
precise information about a GLPK run (see Osi ticket 35).

Of course, many other bugfixes and small improvements have been made and 
the documentation updated.


A note on a problem that can arise when using the new interfaces with a 
GAMS version before 22.6:
It can happen that calling Cbc, Glpk, or Osi fails with a message 
concerning a missing symbol in the library liboptdclib.so (or similiar, 
depending on the system type). This is due to a missing backward 
compatibility in the GAMS I/O libraries.
You can easily upgrade the outdated library in your GAMS distribution by 
overwriting it with the corresponding file from 
ThirdParty/GAMSIO/<system-type>.

Best,
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Vigerske
Humboldt University Berlin, Numerical Mathematics
http://www.math.hu-berlin.de/~stefan