Re: Solver

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 12:47:14AM -0200, Vinicius Provenzano wrote:
> An essential feature to my work that seems to be missing is the bin
> costraint... Yeh, we can always use less elegant workarounds to solve
> this essue, but this feature could minimize the work....

By 'bin' constraint I assume you mean binary and integer constraints.
These would certainly be a welcome addition.  We have
implementations of the basic LP algorithms, but this is definitely
an area where we could use some domain expertise.  The 'solver' in
MS Excel (tm) can not be described in polite terms.  Commercial
grade solvers are several orders of magnitude more complex.  NPSOL
and its derivatives in nag are good examples of code that has taken
years of abuse.  There are definitely more capable algorithms out
there, if someone could point it out we'd love to get it integrated.

This is definitely an area where MS is weak, and I'd like to
capitalise on that.