William E. Hart's Blog

I almost gave the following presentation at the INFORMS Annual Meeting: Installing Python Software Packages: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly That is, I was scheduled to give this talk but my session co-organizer ran over and I had to summarize these slides in 5 minutes! Anyway, these slides describe different strategies for installing Python software.  Although I am a big fan of Python software development, robust strategies for software installation remains a challenge.  This talk describes several different installation scenarios: The Good: the user has administrative privileges Installing on Windows with an installer executable Installing with Linux application utility Installing a Python package from the PyPI repository Installing a Python package from source The Bad: the user does not have administrative privileges Using a virtual environment to isolate package installations Using an installer executable on Windows with a virtual environment The Ugly: the ...

Coopr is a collection of Python optimization-related packages that supports a diverse set of optimization capabilities for formulating and analyzing optimization models. The following are key Coopr capabilities that are driving Coopr development: Pyomo: Formulate algebraic models within Python's modern programming language PySP: Generic solvers for stochastic programming problems COLIN: Scripts that simplify IO between optimizers and black-box applications SUCASA: Customize MIP solvers to expose model structure to the MIP solver engine See https://software.sandia.gov/trac/coopr/wiki/GettingStarted for instructions for getting started with Coopr. An installation script, coopr_install, is provided to simplify the installation of Coopr packages along with the third-party Python packages that they depend on. This installer can also automatically install extension packages from Coin Bazaar. See http://groups.google.com/group/coopr-forum/topics for online discussions of Coopr. Two ...

Ignacio Grossmann and Jon Lee recently announced the CMU-IBM Cyberinfrastructure Collaborative site for MINLP .  The goal of this web site is to create a library of optimization problems in different application areas in which one or several alternative models are presented with their derivation. In addition, each model has one or several instances that can serve to test various algorithms. This effort is different from other test problem collections by requiring a description of the problem, and encouraging the contribution of alternate modeling formulations.  Thus, the actual models in this collection may be MILP or NLP formulations that simplify a nonlinear problem, including simplifications of other MINLP formulations. As it happens, Cindy Phillips, Regan Murray and I are working on a paper that describes our work on sensor placement for water security, where we describe various MILP formulations for this nonlinear application.  I guess we should try to add our models to this repos...

Nick Berger pointed me to the Global Constraint Catalog , a collection of constraints that are can be used for constraint programming formulations.  This looks like a nice reference!

I have recently joined the editorial board of the new journal Mathematical Programming Computation , which publishes original research articles that are at the intersection of math programming and computing. This journal reflects the growing role of computation in operations research, where real-world applications often require the application of complex software packages to analyze mathematical models. This journal will include articles that report on innovative software, comparative tests, modeling environments, libraries of data, and/or applications. A main feature of the journal is the inclusion of accompanying software and data with submitted manuscripts. The journal's review process includes the evaluation and testing of the accompanying software. Where possible, the review will aim for verification of reported computational results. Topics covered in Mathematical Programming Computation include linear programming, convex optimization, nonlinear optimization, stochastic opti...

If you are interested in the intersection of operations research and computing, then the INFORMS ICS Meeting will be of interest to you! I am organizing a session on open-source software for operations research. Contact me if you are interested in giving a presentation!