Quality Assurance and Global Optimization

GAMS Development and ARKI Consulting use Quality Assurance (QA) as an integral part of their software development and software publishing process. Research and development in the global optimization area has resulted in promising implementations. Initiated by customer demand, we have been adding three different global codes, BARON, LGO, and OQNLP, to our portfolio of nonlinear optimization solvers. As part of our QA effort towards the integration and testing of these new global solvers an open architecture for reliability and performance testing of mixed-integer nonlinear optimization codes has been released. This open testing framework has been placed in the public domain (www.gamsworld.org) to serve our customers, and researchers in general, by making reproducible tests a practical proposition. We give examples illustrating the quality assurance process for obtaining performance results for local and global nonlinear and mixed-integer nonlinear programming solvers, using the existing framework tools described in this article.