[ANN] Rima 0.04: Linear Programming for Lua

[Geoff Leyland <geoff_leyland@...>]

Hi,

I'm happy to announce version 0.04 of Rima, a symbolic math modelling package and binding to a number of linear programming [1] libraries.

Documentation starts at http://www.incremental.co.nz/projects/lua.html , development is hosted on google code at http://code.google.com/p/rima/ , and you can get the tarball from http://rima.googlecode.com/files/rima-latest.tar.gz

If you're wanting to solve LPs and IPs from Lua, then as far as I know, Rima's your only choice.  If you're not interested in LPs, then Rima's late-bound symbolic math is still worth a look.  It might be pretty nifty, and at the very least it's a horribly complicated way of solving a simple problem.

The main change since 0.03 is the ability to work with submodels.  This is explained in http://rima.incremental.co.nz/knapsack_2.html , but briefly, any valid rima model can be used as a submodel in a larger model, and gets its own namespace in that larger model.  This means you can construct models from parts, rather than monolithically, and you can reuse model parts.  Both of these features are pretty novel in math programming languages.

If anyone on the Lua list is going to be at INFORMS in Austin in a fortnight, I'll be talking about Rima on Sunday morning.

Any feedback would be much appreciated. (As would help getting the rockspec right).


Cheers,
Geoff

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_programming