SolverStudio Speedup: 2 hours to 20 seconds

One of our OpenSolver users recently worked with modelling guru Stu Mitchell to move his model from OpenSolver to SolverStudio. The OpenSolver model originally took 4 hours to solve. After simplifying the spreadsheet, this reduced to 2 hours. But, Stu then created a SolverStudio version that solved the same problem in just 20 seconds. To quote our user: The conversion to SolverStudio has been an excellent improvement.

If you have a complicated spreadsheet, then you may also find that SolverStudio gives much better solve times than a traditional OpenSolver model. Furthermore, the latest SolverStudio release includes ready-to-run models for many common problem formulations, which helps make using SolverStudio even easier. Give it a go, and let us know how you get on.

Andrew

3 thoughts on “SolverStudio Speedup: 2 hours to 20 seconds”

Noel - September 12, 2014 at 3:53 am

Thanks for your reply Andrew. Yes, I noticed that opensolver bogs down when there is a lot of formula in excel. I actually delete them prior to running opensolver and re-enter them after, but runtime is still a bit slow. I'm excited to see your next release to ease model building; in the meantime I will take a crack at PuLP :) Thanks again and I appreaciate your help.

Noel - September 10, 2014 at 4:13 am

Hi, I have been using OpenSolver to model our factory's machine capacity with great results. However, the model has grown to a point where runtime takes more than one hour to finish. I want to move the model to SolverStudio but I don't have much coding experience and only relied on OpenSolver/Excel user interface to ceate models. I really need some help :). Thanks!

amas008 - September 10, 2014 at 7:24 am
Noel: Our next release will have a different way of building models, which may be faster for your problem. Also, you can make it faster if you delete any cells that are not in the model but still depend on the decision variables. If this does not work, then SolverStudio is a good next step. I suggest you start by looking at some of the examples; GMPL is probably the easiest open-source language to look at (but has a slower solver), with PuLP coming next (with the same fast CBC solver as OpenSolver uses). We will be adding a new language CMPL in the next release, which may be easier than PuLP and can still use the good CBC solver. If this all looks too hard, then Stu Mitchell (http://www.stuartmitchell.com) offers a commercial service to help with conversions to SolverStudio. Hope this helps, Andrew
Reply

3 thoughts on “SolverStudio Speedup: 2 hours to 20 seconds”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply