We academia are very eager to offer advice. Here are a few reasons why solver developers should sometimes refrain from listening too much to what academia has to say. I don’t mean ignoring scientific literature, but rather “advice” and requests for features from graduate students and professors. You can get a set of arguments supporting another opinion on the subject on the associated primal post.
5 reasons why solver developers should listen to academia [primal]
Posted on June 12, 2013 Written by 1 Comment
We academia enjoy giving advice to others. Here are a few reasons why solver developers should sometimes listen to what academia have to say. You can get a set of opposite arguments on the associated dual post. [Continue reading]
Announcing primal / dual posts
Posted on June 11, 2013 Written by Leave a Comment
This post announces a new series of posts that I have been preparing over the last few months. Each set will consist of a pair of posts -the primal and the dual - that will look at a given topic from two different points of view. Posts will usually … [Continue reading]
Speed dating with LocalSolver
Posted on June 5, 2013 Written by Leave a Comment
This post records my observations and comments after my first evening using LocalSolver, a solver based on the local search paradigm rather than on the branch-and-cut framework common to most MIP solvers. Overall, my first contact with LocalSolver … [Continue reading]
Research, Failure and Adversity
Posted on June 1, 2013 Written by 1 Comment
Today’s post is a personal story. Most researchers – either professionals or academic – are accustomed to be successful and to be among the best. When I started doing research, I discovered a new world in which my previous experience didn’t … [Continue reading]
Using commercial solvers in academic research
Posted on May 29, 2013 Written by 2 Comments
Over the last two years or so, I've ran into a couple of discussions about the use of commercial solvers in academic OR projects. There is often a moderate sense of unease when using commercial MILP solvers in our research. The problem is not the … [Continue reading]
Proclaiming the failure of solvers
Posted on May 23, 2013 Written by 1 Comment
Designing specialized optimization algorithms to solve challenging optimization problems has been a very popular research area among academics. Yet much of the justification for this kind of research lies on the inhability of solvers to solve a … [Continue reading]
Closing the (MIP) gap – Part I
Posted on May 8, 2013 Written by Leave a Comment
MIP Solvers are more powerful than ever. They mainly do two things: (1) find high-quality (optimal) solutions, and (2) proving the optimality of that solution. While in most cases performance is evaluated in terms of time-to-optimality, quite often a … [Continue reading]
Speedups: comparing against moving targets
Posted on April 26, 2013 Written by Leave a Comment
[This is post #1 of 2 that were inspired by a tweet from IBM's Jean-François Puget] Over the course of my studies, I had to develop custom solution methods for very challenging supply chain network design problems. While striving to create better … [Continue reading]
Deterministic behavior of CPLEX: ticks or seconds?
Posted on April 24, 2013 Written by 4 Comments
If you are a longtime user of CPLEX, you probably noticed the addition of a number of "ticks" in addition to the displayed wall clock time count in recent versions. According to IBM, it's a computer-independent measure of how much algorithmic work is … [Continue reading]