Introduction of the Orbel Wolsey-Award

You are looking for a motivation to open-source one of your implementation related to Operations Research. The ORBEL Wolsey-Award may interest you!

Scampi Solver

We just released our modest open-source scala library called Scampi to solve OR problems (currently CP, MIP, Derivative Free Optimization, Discrete Event Simulation):

Maybe you'll find it useful, maybe not but for us it was a way to promote Scala (a very nice language) and Operations Research.

Thank you to all the people from n-Side who have contributed or gave us some time to develop on Scampi and our two interns of this summer Cyrille Dejemeppe (UCL) who worked on the derivative free optimization package and Hrayr Kostanyan (ULB) who contributed on the linear programming package. We hope more documentation will come soon and please already accept our apologies for the bugs you may encounter if you try to use it.

PhD Fellowship Award by IBM on CP topics

Patrick Albert (IBM) just announced the PhD Fellowship Award by IBM for topics related to R&D Optimization at IBM, in particular the two following topics:

- Fine grained, constraint-level multi threading in CP solvers.
- Just-in-time compilation techniques for CP solvers.

For more info, contact him and/or consult this page.

2nd DHC to Pascal Van Hentenryck

After the University of Louvain it is now the university of Nantes that recognizes the contributions and impact of Pascal Van Hentenryck by confering him the title of Doctor Honoris Causa (more info here).

This is always a good news for the visibility of CP. Congratulation to him!

CP solves 99% of the problems

Laurent Perron gave an interesting talk at CP'11. Laurent was in charge of ILOG CP Opt and he is now at Google developping the OR department. During his talk he made this remark: "ILOG CP was an expensive product, thus we had only complex problems that were very difficult to solve. When a product costs a lot of money then the companies are interested in it only when they have a very complex (and difficult) problems. Or-tools (the Google CP Solver) is mainly used in internal by Googlers and most of the time for solving easy problems. Almost all problems that we solve everyday are easy." I also remember that Laurent explained to me that he received requests for solving "simple" questions like : enumerate all the possible combinations of these variables. If you need to write such a code from scratch this is not an easy task at all. In fact, some people would like to have a simple tool for writing things like "for each combination of values in this array satisfying this constraint do something". In this case CP is really a good answer.
So maybe the answer about the problems solved by CP is the one proposed by Laurent and that is verified at Google: 99% of the real life problems arising everywhere :-)

The sailing experience with CP

This is a very nice blog post written by Nathan Brixius here. He compares the persons who build solvers to shipbuilder, people who write models to sailors and the end user of applications to passengers. The problem with CP is that the boat is so difficult to sail that to be a good sailor, you also need to have a very good knowledge in shipbuilding so I'm not sure the comparison holds for CP.

My opinions is that CP is probably more like a formula one. Very cool, very fast but .... don't tell me that Michael Schumacher doesn't know anything about the internals of his car (the only problem is that there is no place for passengers in a formula one ;-)).

The CP summer Mercatto

After Philippe Gilbert (cycling) joining BMC Racing Team and Romelu Lukaku (soccer) joining Chelsea another great Belgian transfer happened during the summer mercato.
Leading computer scientist Pascal Van Hentenryck joins NICTA. This is a very good news for the field of CP that people like that will work together. More details in the press release.