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Jeudi 25 Novembre
| Heure: |
10:30 - 11:30 |
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Salle B107, bâtiment B, Université de Villetaneuse |
| Résumé: |
SMS++: a Structured Modelling System with ... hopefully, one day ... some useful application? |
| Description: |
Antonio Frangioni On February this year, after about 8 years of gestation, an early beta release of the Structured Modelling System++ has been released to general public availability. SMS++ is a C++ library intended to facilitate the development of very large optimization problems with multiple nested heterogeneous structure, and especially of the corresponding solution methods, chiefly (but not exclusively) ones based on (parallel) decomposition. In the attempt of achieving this goal SMS++ has accrued a number of features that look quite unique in the landscape of modelling systems, so much so as to raise the legitimate suspicion that the reason why these features have never been developed before is because no sane person would have ever thought them a good idea. Yet the system is there and it does seem to offer some new viewpoints on mathematical modelling systems that may at least be worth a look. SMS++ is itself developed in an highly modular fashion and already counts a(n hopefully growing) number of separate sub-projects besides the "core" library and the support tools. One of these allows to solve Lagrangian Duals of complex integer programs with remarkable ease, and it will hopefully soon be joined by a similar component doing Benders' decomposition. Hence, there may actually be a few use cases in which SMS++ could be worth considering already, despite the very many missing components that would be needed to make it a really compelling prposition. In fact, perhaps the most interesting feature of SMS++ is it being community-oriented and (at least in principle) almost infinitely extendable to try to cater for the very diverse needs of the disparate clades of the optimization world. This alone may make it worth a second look, notwithstanding the arguably insane delusions of an all-conquering modelling system that some of the developers harbour and that would require capturing an unfeasibly large amount of mindshare to achieve. |
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