Month: November 2011

COIN-OR Cup, 2011 edition

COIN-OR is a project to spur open-source activities in operations research.  I am a big supporter of this activity, to the extent that I was part of its Strategic Leadership Board for a term until I did them an even bigger favor by stepping aside for people who could be even better at this than I (not that such people were exactly rare:  my time on SLB corresponded to a somewhat over-committed time for me).

Every year COIN-OR gives out an award called the COIN-OR INFORMS Cup.  This year’s winner has just been announced, and I think the committee has made an inspired choice:

The submission “OpenSolver: Open Source Optimisation for Excel using COIN-OR”, by Andrew Mason and Iain Dunning, has been selected as the winner of the 2011 edition of the COIN-OR INFORMS Cup. OpenSolver is an “Open Source linear and integer optimizer for Microsoft Excel. OpenSolver is an Excel VBA add-in that extends Excel’s built-in Solver with a more powerful Linear Programming solver.” (from http://opensolver.org)

This year’s award recognizes that lots and lots of people want to use top-notch optimization code, but would like to stay in the world of Excel.  The authors of this work (who I am very proud to say come from the University of Auckland (at least in Andrew’s case), where I was a visitor in 2007) have done a great job in integrated the optimization codes from COIN-OR into an easy-to-use interface in Excel.  It is a fantastic piece of work (that I blogged about previously) and one that I believe does a tremendous amount of good for the world of operations research.  If you can model in Excel’s Solver, then you can plug in OpenSolver and start using the COIN-OR solvers with no limits on problem size.  I am also delighted to see that that they have moved to CPL licensing, rather than GPL, which was my only whine in my original post.

Congratulations Andrew and Iain.  If you would like to celebrate this award, there is a reception to attend, thanks to IBM:

All entrants and their supporters are welcome to join in the celebration and regale (rile) the prize winners.

Date: Sunday, November 13
Time: 8pm-10pm

Location: The Fox and Hound
330 North Tryon St.
Charlotte, NC 28202
(Directions: http://tinyurl.com/75zhm7k)

The celebration is sponsored by IBM.

Good work by the committee:

The COIN-OR INFORMS Cup committee:

Pietro Belotti
Matthew Galati
R. Kipp Martin
Stefan Vigerske

Kiwis and open source rule!

This entry also occurs in the INFORMS Conference blog.

Getting ready for Charlotte, and first blog entry there

I am getting ready for the INFORMS Conference coming up next week in Charlotte.  As I generally do, I will be guest blogging at the conference (along with more than a dozen others: great lineup this year!), so my blog entries will appear there (often with a copy showing up here).  I have put together my first entry, entitled “Hoisted on Operations Research’s Petard” (a petard is a small bomb;  if a military engineer had his bomb explode prematurely, he would be hoisted into the air):

For ’tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard, an’t shall go hard

Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4

I am greatly looking foward to this year’s INFORMS Annual Conference in Charlotte.  There is nothing like getting together with 4000 of my closest friends, raising many a coffee (and other liquids) in toasting the successes of our field.

I could see the successes of operations research over the last couple of days as I tried to change my flights and hotel in reaction to some family issues.  I had booked everything months ago, paying a pittance for the flight and getting the conference rate for the hotel.  Of course, trying to rebook things three days in advance was a different story:  $150 change fees, along with quadrupling of airfare was the opening bid, with the opportunity to pay about six times the airfare if I wanted to fly at a time when humans are normally awake.   And I’m not sure why this happened, but the hotel took the chance to increase my daily rate by $10, even though I just knocked a day off my reservation.  The conference suddenly became a lot more expensive, just because my wife pointed out that if I don’t rake the leaves on Saturday, when will it ever get done!

I know who to blame for all this:  operations research, of course.  The subfield of “Revenue Management” makes change fees and differential pricing a science.  And that field is one of the great success stories of operations research, as shown by such things as the string of Edelman finalists that focus on revenue management.  So, while I rue the extra expense that operations research has caused me, I can take solace in knowing that I will eventually gain far more due to the overall success of our field.

See you in Charlotte!