sci.op-research

On Feb 28, 3:35 pm, Matthew Galati wrote:
> Is there a way to export a MILP from Excel/Frontline to a .MPS file?
>
> Thanks,
> Matt

Matt,

You may want to talk to Frontline. I have the Frontline Premium
Platform. The MIP solver still pretty much stinks so I don't use it.
I suppose that's why you want to export your MIP model. I use MPL and
the XA solver for anything more than making 4 kinds of sausage out of
3 kinds of meat LP's in Excel. Unfortunately the Premium Platform
does not have an Export to MPS utility like the stand alone model
managers. Which is not surprising because it's not only the
performance of the Frontline package that holds it back, but also the
creation of complex index sets that MPL, GAMS, etc. do explicitly, but
Frontline does behind a curtain. Without the index sets you can't
build the MPS file.

So I think if you leave Frontline, you are looking at a reformulation
from scratch. Incidentally, before MPL I used to build MPS files
using the old Paradox DBMS. I built the file piecewise. What made it
relatively easy was the query wizard which is now much more powerful
in Access. I strung together multiple queries in a subroutine and
wrote out a piece of the MPS file after each query. I created new
columns in each query that represented the index values of each
variable. So it's not automatic but the technique works.

Good Luck,

SteveM