CPLEX components

Describes the components of CPLEX: Interactive Optimizer, Concert Technology, Callable Library.

CPLEX comes in various forms to meet a wide range of users' needs:

• The CPLEX Interactive Optimizer is an executable program that can read a problem interactively or from files in certain standard formats, solve the problem, and deliver the solution interactively or into text files. The program consists of the file cplex.exe on Windows platforms or cplex on UNIX platforms.

• Concert Technology is a set of C++, Java, and .NET class libraries offering an API that includes modeling facilities to allow the programmer to embed CPLEX optimizers in C++, Java, or .NET applications. Table 1. lists the files that contain the libraries.

  Table 1. Concert Technology libraries

  	Microsoft Windows	UNIX
  C++	ilocplex.lib concert.lib	libilocplex.a libconcert.a
  Java	cplex.jar	cplex.jar
  .NET	ILOG.CPLEX.dll ILOG.Concert.dll

  The Concert Technology libraries make use of the Callable Library (described next).

• The CPLEX Callable Library is a C library that allows the programmer to embed CPLEX optimizers in applications written in C, Visual Basic, FORTRAN, or any other language that can call C functions. The library is provided in files cplexXXX.lib and cplexXXX.dll on Windows platforms, and in libcplex.a, libcplex.so, and libcplex.sl on UNIX platforms.

• The Python API for CPLEX a full-featured Python application programming interface supporting all aspects of CPLEX optimization.

In this manual, the phrase CPLEX Component Libraries is used to refer equally to any of these libraries. While all of the libraries are callable, the term CPLEX Callable Library as used here refers specifically to the C library.