Announcing What’sBest! 19, the Optimization Add-in for Excel

Release 19 includes a wide range of performance enhancements and new features:

• Advancements in the Nonlinear and Global Solvers including improved handling of IF statements and polynomials.

• Improved Multi-start Solver for quickly finding good solutions to difficult non-convex problems.

• Improved reproducibility when solving a problem repeatedly, particularly with the concurrent option when solving with fastest of Barrier, Primal simplex, and Dual simplex solver.

• Improved handling of Blackbox Excel models, that have either

              o All variables binary,

              o All functions in the optimization model are linear.

In these situations, all available Excel functions can be used.

New What’sBest! functions 

• WBPOLYNOMIAL to efficiently handle univariate polynomials, and 

• WBCENSOR to efficiently handle piecewise linear S shaped functions as in neural nets.

• Improved warning messages for improperly formulated models.

• External Solvers Improvements. Increased support for the external solvers, including linear solvers such as COPT, CLP and HIGHS. Improved support for not only CONOPT, but also external Nonlinear solvers such as IPOpt