Premium Solver Platform 11
Features
- Premium Solver Platform includes full support for both 32-bit and 64-bit Excel 2010 and Excel 2007 - the biggest Excel upgrade in at least 10 years, with everything from a new "ribbon" based user interface to huge worksheets with 16,384 columns and 1,048,576 rows - far beyond the 256 column and 65,536 row limits in previous Excel releases. This makes it much easier to lay out your models on a worksheet, without having to split up large tables of information.
- Premium Solver Platform supports Solver models spread across multiple worksheets in a workbook, with decision variables and constraints on any worksheet. Different models may be defined on each worksheet, and each model can include variables and constraints on any sheet in a workbook. Solver reports, previously limited to 65,536 rows, are now automatically 'wrapped' and may be of virtually unlimited size, even in Excel 2000-2003. Report generation is typically 5-7 times faster for models of a few thousand variables, and many times faster for larger models.
- Premium Solver Platform can deliver multiple solutions, not just a single best solution, for integer programming and global optimisation problems. The best integer solutions ('incumbents') for MIP problems, locally optimal solutions for global optimisation problems, or best final population members for non-smooth problems solved with the Evolutionary Solver can be viewed in a worksheet report, or easily accessed in your VBA code via the new object-oriented API.
- Premium Solver Platform supports a new, optional style for defining optimisation models with functions on the worksheet. You can move easily between the traditional interactive modelling style and the new functions such as PsiVar(), PsiObj() and PsiCon(), or between the new functions for optimisation and Risk Solver Engine's functions for simulation.
- Interactive Optimisation enables Premium Solver Platform to re-optimise your model each time you change a number on the spreadsheet. For small to medium size models, this is not only a convenience - it can be a real decision aid: You'll find that insights about your model, and decisions you can make, start to flow intuitively, when you can quickly see the impact of changing a parameter on the optimal solution.
- Premium Solver Platform features a new objected-oriented API (application programming interface), accessible from Excel VBA, that matches the object-oriented API of the Solver Platform SDK, the flagship product for developing optimisation and simulation using modern programming languages such as C#, C++, VB.NET, Java and MATLAB. The new API makes it much easier to develop powerful custom applications in Excel, and to move applications from Excel to a programming language.
- Premium Solver Platform includes Frontline's Polymorphic Spreadsheet Interpreter that replaces the core of Excel with a dramatically improved ability to analyse your spreadsheet models for linear, quadratic, smooth nonlinear, and nonsmooth functions - and, in a research breakthrough not available in any other commercial software, automatically determine (in many cases) whether your nonlinear model is convex - the key property that makes it possible to solve your model quickly and reliably, to very large size.
- And if your model uses common Excel functions like IF, MIN. MAX, ABS, AND, OR and NOT and comparison operators, that make the model nonsmooth and cause problems for conventional optimisers, Premium Solver Platform can automatically transform your model to an equivalent form that replaces these functions with additional variables and linear constraints. You simply check a box to "Solve Transformed Model" and click Solve - the Polymorphic Spreadsheet Interpreter does the work of an expert operations research analyst and transforms your model into one that can be solved faster and more reliably.
- Premium Solver Platform includes a new, far more powerful LP/Quadratic Solver that handles linear (LP), quadratic (QP) and mixed-integer (MIP) problems, with up to 8,000 variables (and up to 2,000 integer variables). This Solver offers world-class performance in both speed on large problems, and robustness on poorly scaled problems. It includes a powerful presolver, advanced primal and dual Simplex methods, and powerful Branch, Cut & Bound method for mixed-integer problems.
- Premium Solver Platform also includes new support for second order cone programming (SOCP) - the natural generalisation of linear and quadratic programming - with new, easy to use second order cone (SOC) constraints, a new SOCP Barrier Solver built-in to Premium Solver Platform, and the new, field-installable MOSEK Solver Engine, widely regarded as the world's best Solver for SOCP problems.