We provide an open source ecosystem centered around optimization and operations research, in order to achieve the following:
- Provide software and documentation to create and optimize problems based on a simple but powerful assignment model.
- Empower people to model and reason about complex systems, built out of inter connected optimization problems.
- Enable the user to understand the results given a solver and an optimization system.
- Develop new optimization algorithms.
- Provide compatibility between different optimization systems.
The sub project Crisis Network (Cin) is the main playground in order to demonstrate and evaluate the results. It is a game, that allows one to inject optimization problems into a shared world, in order to create a system with an enormous amount of complexity, thereby bringing the modelers and solvers to its limits and beyond.
A game was chosen for this, in order to a have a concept on how to create and maintain a complex system, that still makes sense, when looked at by humans. There is not much more demotivating, than to optimize systems, that are complex and have no semantic meaning. A game also has a very high requirement for a good UI regarding the optimization software and therefore incentives one to not neglect the UI too much. At last, a game can be advertised to a larger audience, than optimization software.
