The Campaign for McMaster University
The Campaign for McMaster University
Benchmarking GAMS MINLP Solvers
and Excel Solver
Miaodi Sun, Elkafi Hassini
School of Computational Science and Engineering, DeGroote School of Business
McMaster University
The Campaign for McMaster University
The Campaign for McMaster University
Motivation


Spreadsheets-based solvers (SBS) have been mostly used by
practitioners. Lately there is a growing interest in these
platforms from academics as well.
However, SBSs have not been tested systematically for
solving MINLPs due to the closed-source nature of SBSs and
the lack of standard test libraries.
The Campaign for McMaster University
The Campaign for McMaster University
Project Overview

The purpose of our project is to alleviate some of these
difficulties. We are working on developing a tool(GAMS2XLS)
that would allow the conversion of GAMS files to a format that
readily interacts with Excel solver platforms. Subsequently, we
will use this tool to test Excel solvers against common MINLP
solvers that are available through GAMS.