DIMACS workshop on Coin-OR

This week, I attend DIMACS workshop on Coin-OR. I am not pure optimization people and have not implemented any project based on any package of Coin-OR before. But I am really astonished to see those really really busy people devotes their time to the open source software on the optimization, even if it may be necessary for them to develop code for their own research. This fresh experience brings me to a new world. Besides this, this trip gives me a chance to know other people in our department better.

During the workshop, I get to know a person from Archstone-Smith working on the revenue management. He came here and try to find a package to replace Cplex which their software is based on. But it turns out that he is a little disappointed on it. The reasons are warmly discussed in the last presentations. They may be the common concern about open source software, legal and support issue. It would be nice to see a company making money by supporting Coin-OR. The problem is whether there is such demand? Then it leads to the issue about awareness of OR either in public or among other research areas. As Stephen Nash point, there are big and interesing questions in other science fields such as how universe begins. If everyone include me know the biggest problems in OR area, the future of Coin-OR would be bright. Otherwise, it is just a tool of researchers.

I hope there is one day a book introducing how to model OR by using Coin-OR through a well spread tool such as Excel like VBA for Modelers: Developing Decision Support Systems Using Microsoft® Excel. And the reader reviews is over 20. This is similar to Leo Lopes presents at the last part of his presentation to show how to use web service through VBA.

The presentation file can be found in workshop website.