COIN-OR

COIN-OR

The Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR) project is an initiative to spur the development of open-source software for the operations research community.

Why open source? The Open Source Initiative explains it well. When people can read, redistribute, and modify the source code, software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. The results of open-source development have been remarkable. Community-based efforts to develop software under open-source licenses have produced high-quality, high-performance code---code on which much of the Internet is run.

Why for OR? Consider the following scenario. You read about an optimization algorithm in the literature and you get an idea on how to improve it. Today, testing your new idea typically requires re-implementing (and re-debugging and re-testing) the original algorithm. Often, clever implementation details aren't published. It can be difficult to replicate reported performance. Now imagine the scenario if the original algorithm was publicly available in a community repository. Weeks of re-implementing would no longer be required. You would simply check out a copy of it for yourself and modify it. Imagine the productivity gains from software reuse!