Over the last two decades, ILOG CPLEX has found its way into a broad range of applications.

It remains a vital part of planning for manufacturing, transportation and supply chain management, but inroads are being made into other industries, including utilities, energy and mining. And through workforce management systems, retail cashiers, call center agents and drivers are being scheduled both in accordance with their preferences and for greater efficiency and service levels.

The advancements in ILOG CPLEX 11 translate into better decision making. For example, ILOG CPLEX’s new level of performance allows organizations to increase the scope of their planning from a single region to several, turn an overnight batch job into an interactive application or do rapid what-if analysis on a planning problem.

Powering ever better planning and scheduling applications is the primarily goal of our ongoing R&D, and we’re extremely proud of what we have accomplished with ILOG CPLEX 11.

The solution pool enables the user to pick the best solution for a problem. Click to enlarge (opens a new window)

ILOG CPLEX 11
Performance like nothing before
Algorithmic advances and enhanced multicore support give the new ILOG CPLEX 11 more than twice the solving speed on average for mixed integer programming (MIP) problems of any previous version of the product. ILOG CPLEX’s new dynamic search algorithm takes branch-and-cut algorithms to the next level. With innovations in branching, node and cut strategies, the algorithm reaches optimal solutions faster and helps broaden ILOG CPLEX’s problem range.

To work better on multicore computers, ILOG Parallel CPLEX now offers two modes for parallel optimization: deterministic and opportunistic. Users get repeatable solution paths with the first, while the second allows independence among threads that often results in even better performance.

Giving users a choice
Not every aspect of a problem can be captured with a MIP model. ILOG CPLEX’s new solution pool feature assembles a selection of alternative solutions for the user to choose from. For instance, a production planner can request five solutions within 2 percent of optimality, and then select the best one for balancing production lines based on information that could not be captured in the MIP model.

ILOG CPLEX 11 also introduces a performance tuning utility for applications. It analyzes a model or a set of models to identify parameter settings that provide better performance than default settings.

“We have broken new ground with ILOG CPLEX 11,” says Rosemary Berger, ILOG CPLEX product manager. “The algorithmic performance improvements alone are greater than ever, and when combined with multicore technology, you have a vastly more powerful computational engine for planning and scheduling applications. For particularly difficult models, we’re talking about an order-of-magnitude speedup compared with ILOG CPLEX 10.”

Learn more at http://cplex.ilog.com.