Advanced features of the Interactive Optimizer

Further reading about advanced features of the Interactive Optimizer is available in the CPLEX User's Manual.

This introduction to the Interactive Optimizer presents most of the commands and their options. There are also other, more advanced features of the Interactive Optimizer, documented in the CPLEX User's Manual. Here short descriptions of those advanced features and links to further information about them.

The tuning tool can help you discern nondefault parameter settings that lead to faster solving time. Examples: time limits on tuning in the Interactive Optimizer shows how to use the tuning tool in the Interactive Optimizer.

The solution pool stores multiple solutions to a mixed integer programming (MIP) model. With this feature, you can direct the optimizer to generate multiple solutions in addition to the optimal solution. CPLEX offers facilities to manage the solution pool and to access members of the solution pool. Solution pool: generating and keeping multiple solutions describes those facilities and documents the corresponding commands of the Interactive Optimizer.

The conflict refiner is a tool to diagnose the cause of infeasibility in a model or MIP start, whether continuous or discrete, whether linear or quadratic. Diagnosing infeasibility by refining conflicts documents the conflict refiner generally, and Meet the conflict refiner in the Interactive Optimizer introduces the conflict refiner as a feature of the Interactive Optimizer.

FeasOpt attempts to repair an infeasibility by modifying the model according to preferences set by the user. FeasOpt accepts an infeasible model and selectively relaxes the bounds and constraints in a way that minimizes a weighted penalty function that you define. Repairing infeasibilities with FeasOpt documents this feature and refers throughout to commands available in the Interactive Optimizer.

The runseeds option is a tool to help you evaluate variability of your model by solving your problem repeatedly, each time with a different random seed. Evaluating variability documents this option and shows a log of such an evaluation.

The user may supply a MIP start, also known as an advanced start or a warm start, to serve as the first integer solution when CPLEX solves a MIP. Such a solution might come from a MIP problem solved previously or from the user's knowledge of the problem, for example. MIP starts and the Interactive Optimizer introduces commands of the Interactive Optimizer to manage MIP starts.

For those who like to use common shell features within the Interactive Optimizer, a Technote explains how to configure either Windows or UNIX platforms to make such features as command history, command-line editing, or tab-completion of file names available within a session of the Interactive Optimizer. (At the bottom of this page, among the related links, you can find a link to this Technote.)