Microsoft Solver Foundation Express /w Gurobi

Microsoft has released v1.1 of its Solver Foundation which introduces a plug-in model to support running against any number of solvers.  The express edition is shipping with a throttle Gurobi solver which has proven to be a strong completitor to industry heavy weights such as the recently aquired CPLEX from ILog (IBM).  

As part of this release, samples are included for swapping in different solvers including the open source lp_solve mixed integer linear programming (MILP) library.  It’s worth nothing that the samples are installed into your ‘My Documents’ directory if you find yourself scratching your head!

The Excel add-in makes it easy to experiment with models using a Optimization Modeling Language (OML) editor data-bound to cells, and for the developers the C# object model supports LINQ data-binding.

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