Abstract not found

Testing is a crucial part of software development in general, and hence also in mathematical programming. Unfortunately, it is often a time consuming and little exciting activity. This naturally motivated us to increase the e ciency in testing solvers for optimization problems and to automatize as much of the procedure as possible. Keywords: test environment, optimization, solver benchmarking, solver comparison The testing procedure typically consists of three basic tasks: a) organize test problem sets, also called test libraries; b) solve selected test problems with selected solvers; c) analyze, check and compare the results. The Test Environment is a graphical user interface (GUI) that enables to manage the tasks a) and b) interactively, and task c) automatically. The Test Environment is particularly designed for users who seek to 1. adjust solver parameters, or 2. compare solvers on single problems, or 3. evaluate solvers on suitable test sets.

Abstract. This paper serves as background information for the Vienna proposal for interval standardization, explaining what is needed in practice to make competent use of the interval arithmetic provided by an implementation of the standard to be. Discussed are methods to improve the quality of interval enclosures of the range of a function over a box, considerations of possible hardware support facilitating the implementation of such methods, and the results of a simple interval challenge that I had posed to the reliable computing mailing list on November 26, 2008. Also given is an example of a bound constrained global optimization problem in 4 variables that has a 2-dimensional continuum of global minimizers. This makes standard branch and bound codes extremely slow, and therefore may serve as a useful degenerate test problem.

Abstract. The Test Environment is an interface to efficiently test different optimization solvers. It is designed as a tool for both developers of solver software and practitioners who just look for the best solver for their specific problem class. It enables users to: • Choose and compare diverse solver routines; • Organize and solve large test problem sets; • Select interactively subsets of test problem sets; • Perform a statistical analysis of the results, automatically produced as L ATEX and PDF output. The Test Environment is free to use for research purposes.