COIN-OR
COIN-OR in 2008
Open-source software for O.R. research community continues to grow.
By Robin Lougee-Heimer
(COIN-OR) is the premier Web site devoted to open-source software for the operations research community. Hosted by INFORMS, COIN-OR is currently home to 30 projects and a burgeoning community. COIN-OR encourages new project contributions by providing extensive tools and infrastructure for collaborative project development. For more information about COIN-OR's history, goals and projects, see "COIN-OR Pays Off" (OR/MS Today, October 2005) or visit www.coin-or.org. This article highlights 2008 accomplishments.
New Developments
While established projects continued to evolve thanks to many in the user and developer communities (see individual project pages for details), the Technical Leadership Council of the COIN-OR Foundation continued their efforts to standardize the COIN-OR infrastructure and improve the ease-of-use across projects.
Council members Ted Ralphs (chair, Lehigh University), JP Fasano (IBM), Laszlo Ladanyi (IBM), Leo Lopes (University of Arizona), Francois Margot (Carnegie Mellon University), Kipp Martin (University of Chicago) and Andreas Wächter (IBM) spent much of their effort in 2008 working on mechanisms to ensure that projects using COIN-OR's BuildTools will evolve together and continue to interoperate over time.
A new project called TestTools was launched in April 2008 by JP Fasano, Kipp Martin and Stefan Vigerske (Humboldt University Berlin). The TestTools project provides Python scripts to automatically download, configure, build, test and install COIN-OR projects. Currently, these scripts are run to build 17 COIN-OR projects in approximately 15 configurations every night, thereby helping to identify new bugs as early as possible. This valuable service helps mangers of projects hosted on COIN-OR maintain a robust code base.
The nightly build scripts in TestTools are used to build binaries of COIN-OR projects. The binaries are planned for distribution via the CoinBinary project. COIN-OR has started distributing binaries for several platforms on a test basis, and plans to create RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) files on the Linux platform. More information on the Council and their activities is available at projects.coin-or.org/CoinTLC.
New Users
One of COIN-OR's lofty goals is to accelerate the adoption of state-of-the-art models, algorithms and computational research. The following new-user reports indicate continuing progress:
• The Decision Technologies Group at Union Pacific Railroad is using two COIN-OR hosted projects, FlopC++ (an algebraic modeling language embedded in the C++ programming language) and COIN-OR Branch and Cut library (CBC), to develop real-time dispatching components and strategic material supply solutions. The proprietary AMPL modeling language and the open-source CBC are being used for proof-of-concept work in areas such as railroad car scheduling and data envelopment analysis of network throughput.
• Sandia National Laboratories and the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency are using the COIN-OR Open Solver Interface (OSI), the COIN-OR Linear Program Solver (CLP) and the COIN-OR Cut Generation Library (CGL) to develop optimal sensor placements for water security application. This 2008 INFORMS Edelman Finalist application is just one of the many active uses of PICO - a parallel integer programming optimizer developed by Jonathan Eckstein (Rutgers University) and the Sandia National Laboratories experts Bill Hart, Cynthia Phillips and Jean-Paul Watson using select COIN-OR components.
Additional users reports can be found in the 2008 Annual Report of the COIN-OR Foundation.
COIN-OR at INFORMS Washington
At the recent INFORMS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., COIN-OR held several events, including a vendor workshop, the 2008 COIN-OR INFORMS Cup Competition, a technical program, a COIN-OR members and users meeting and a COIN-OR presence in the exhibit area. If you attended the conference, we hope you had the chance to attend one or more of these events.
The vendor workshop was organized by Brad Bell (University of Washington), Robin Lougee-Heimer (IBM) and Kipp Martin. Dubbed "COIN-OR 101," the event aimed to introduce participants to COIN-OR through hands-on learning. Attendees learned about, and received a copy of, the wide variety of software that is freely available from COIN-OR.
The technical program, jointly sponsored by the INFORMS Computing Society and the INFORMS Optimization Society, featured a cluster on open-source software organized by Joao Goncalves (IBM) and highlighted a broad range of open-source efforts in O.R. and the work of many people in the open-source community.
Robin Lougee-Heimer (Robinlh@us.ibm.com) is a research staff member in the Mathematical Sciences Department with the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and a program manager of COIN-OR.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2008 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
Lionheart Publishing, Inc.
506 Roswell Rd., Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060 USA
Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969
E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com
URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com
Web Site © Copyright 2008 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.