[Scilab-Dev] AMPL toolbox

[Stéphane Mottelet]

Well, I was reacting to the "currently there is no planned work to port 
external toolboxes by ESI" because some of the actual *decent* internal 
computational stuff in Scilab (e.g. UMFpack) was initially developped as 
an external toolbox (by B. Pincon). As far as optimization stuff is 
concerned, the Sci_ipopt+Fmincon atoms packages should be considered by 
ESI.

The problem is that some users (like me) keep trying to solve not 
"common use-cases" problems with Scilab. The last two cases where I had 
to use something else than optim are :

1-a non-linear optimization problem with linear inequality constraints  
(not that complicated, but optim does no handle this) where I had to 
switch to cfsqp (but stayed with Scilab here)
2-a difficult optimization problem where an interior-point method was 
the only successful one (here I had to switch to Matlab, sorry)

I could give you other cases where some computational internals of 
Scilab are a bit outdated. In the past 10 years the focus has been made 
on things that are visible (interface, graphics, widgets, ...)  and 
recently on language internals and much more. However, I think that the 
time has come to also update the stuff that would allows to do serious 
applied mathematics and not just solve "common use-cases". I hope that 
Scilab's future now depends on ESI is a good news.

Stéphane Mottelet


Le 03/04/2017 à 09:44, Pierre Vuillemin a écrit :
> While it is not internal (and not necessarily decent at this point 
> ^^), I am developing a toolbox for optimization 
> <https://github.com/pivui/sopi> in Scilab. Its aim is firstly to 
> provide a convenient way to formulate optimization problems.
> It is currently very limited (mainly dense linear optimization 
> problems 
> <https://github.com/pivui/sopi/blob/master/demos/sopi_demo_LP.sce> + 
> some quadratic problems) and paused due to some porting issue with 
> Scilab 6...but still, it may be usable at some point in the future :).
> Regards,
> Pierre
>
>
> Le 03.04.2017 09:30, Clément David a écrit :
>> Hi Stéphane,
>>
>> Le lundi 03 avril 2017 à 08:53 +0200, Stéphane Mottelet a écrit :
>>> BTW are there plans to port a *decent* and internal optimization 
>>> package ?
>>
>> Why not but what do you mean by *decent* ? using an external solver ?
>>
>> IMHO Optimization is a wide topic where there is a lot of different
>> solvers available. The current
>> Scilab implementation might not be sufficient for all needs but cover
>> some of the common use-cases.
>>
>> --
>> Clément
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-- 
Département de Génie Informatique
EA 4297 Transformations Intégrées de la Matière Renouvelable
Université de Technologie de Compiègne -  CS 60319
60203 Compiègne cedex

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