COIN fORgery: Developing Open Source Tools for Operations Research

The Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR) project is a community-based initiative to promote the development of open-source software within the mathematical optimization and operations research communities. Software developed with support from COIN-OR has been an essential part of hundreds of peer-reviewed research papers and is embedded in hundreds of software systems, including widely used open-source environments for decision support and mathematical analysis such as R, Sage, and Open Office. In addition, COIN-OR tools can be easily called from popular programming languages (Java, C/C++, Python, Julia, Matlab) and can be used in concert with the major commercial and open source modelling systems (AMPL, GAMS, AIMMS, MPL, PuLP, Pyomo). COIN-OR software is widely used in academic, commercial, and government organizations worldwide for solving a wide range of optimization and other operations research problems.

This workshop will be the opening workshop in what will be a full year of “coding sprints” in which small groups will be hosted at the IMA for intensive periods of code development. The goals of the workshop and of the entire year of coding sprints will be to:

• bring together developers interested in working on specific open source projects;
• engage new users and potential developers in the COIN-OR community;
• disseminate information about projects to potential users and developers; and
• to develop a roadmap for development of key projects of interest.

Target Audience

We expect a broad spectrum of attendees from both the developer and user communities, as well as from industry, academia, and government labs.

• End users/packagers/integrators, including those wanting to use our libraries and modelling tools.
• Current COIN-OR developers who want to learn more.
• Developers of new projects wanting to use our (build) tools.
• People interested in the internals of our tools so they can extend/improve them.

Program

The general structure of the workshop will be to have tutorials and/or technical talks in the mornings, optional topical discussion at lunch for those who are interested, and hands-on breakout sessions in the afternoon. Each day will have a theme and be led by a different member of the COIN-OR community. A running theme will be the future of COIN-OR and how to put it on a sustainable track. The focus of the workshop will be primarily on the tools in the COIN-OR Optimization Suite.

Daily themes

• Monday: Intro, build system, development
• Tuesday: Documentation, unit testing, continuous integration
• Wednesday: Python integration
• Thursday: APIs, Generic interfaces
• Friday: Research challenges, sustainability, future plans