Bigger, Better, Faster: update on Cbc, the world’s fastest open-source MIP solver

The COIN-OR Branch and Cut (Cbc) is the world’s fastest open-source mixed-integer program solver. In the past year alone, the addition of new heuristics, a 2x increase in preprocessing speed, and the improved dynamic use of cutting planes helped to realize a significant speed-up for version version 2.0 (2007) to version 2.3 (2008). On the well-know Mittleman benchmark testsuite there is a 55% reduction in the geometric mean of the total time for solved problems and a 75% reduction in the number of unsolved within the time limit. In this talk, we will survey the enhancements made to Cbc in the past three years and discuss the on-going efforts to further improve the code. The Cbc library is a premier project of COIN-OR available under an open-source license at www.coin-or.org.