When I encountered with GIPALS I was really impressed by this program. I had never seen something like this before. The matter is that it can solve any type of financial, industrial, educational and even everyday problems occurred in our way!
Before my description I would like to note that GIPALS is rather software for technical professionals than for common users but it just makes it better! To professionals I should say that the word “GIPALS” means
General Interior-Point Algorithm Linear Solver and it is a linear programming environment that contains large-scale linear programs solver and intuitive graphical user interface to direct specify or import and solve various types of constrained optimization problems.
What is GIPALS for?
As an example how GIPALS works let imagine a situation below.
You have decided to be fit and healthy. Now you need an optimal plan how to get better. The first thing you need is a balanced diet containing right caloric value and all necessary ingredients such as proteins, carbohydrates and fat. And of course the diet should have a minimal cost.
You go to a food store to choose foods matching your diet. What do you see? You see a huge amount of different foods, caloric values, ingredients and prices. How to put it all together to get the diet you need?
GIPALS will help you! All you need is just to enter all this stuff into special input boxes of application and click Result button. And GIPALS will kindly give to you ideal diet at a minimal price. The program also may exclude some products from the diet because of their unprofitable qualities. So, you have an ideal decision now!
Besides that example you can easily operate various data to solve any problem you want. For example you can use GIPALS to calculate transportation and manufacture costs, percentage of components in alloys or mixtures and so on.
It is easily to trust in GIPALS’ decisions, because Interior-Point method (Mehrotra predictor-corrector algorithm) on which the program is based always gives to you exact mathematical result. Of course, as you already understood, it is not necessary to be professional and have special mathematical knowledge to work with GIPALS, because of its easy and intuitive graphical user interface, Help and Sample Problems files.
Intuitive graphical interface
The Main window includes the Main menu, the Toolbar and the Working area. It is possible to open more than one child window within the single Main window.
The Main menu is well-built to reach a command you need. As usual, the Toolbar contains some buttons that operate the most frequently used commands. The Working area is a free space which allows you to place several windows, easily move, minimize and maximize them.
In the left side of the Main window there are four buttons linked to special pages such as Setup, Variables, Constraints and Result. Don’t lose sight of them, because in particular those pages specify all data which should be processed.
On the page Setup a title, an objective, a size and a description of a linear program should be specified. In our example foods are the Variants, and proteins, carbohydrates, fat and calories are Constraints.
In general, any explanation of any function and way to act you can find in Help file which is rather detailed. There are even mathematical articles explaining some methods used in the software. There are Simplex Method, Interior Point Methods, Affine Scaling Method and Mehrotra Predictor - Corrector algorithm, Linear System, Matrix Vector Multiplication etc.
Features of GIPALS
I want to say that GIPALS is the powerful mathematical core that allows solving of constrained optimization problems with the maximum number of variables as 500,000. The number of constraints can reach 500,000 as well!
Furthermore, the application supports several data formats. It can import linear programs in Mathematical Programming System (MPS) data format and export linear programs to files in MPS format too. The results of the linear programs can be saved as CSV (comma-delimited spreadsheet), Tab-delimited or HTML file. Working data can be directly copied, pasted from/to MS Excel spreadsheets by Windows clipboard.
Also, the program has such functions as flexible Debug options, Tracing variable values at each iteration, and provides several additional tools. There are Matrix - vector multiplication, a Solver a system of linear equations by Gauss - Jordan methods (LUP decomposition); a View the palette of LP constrains matrix and even a command line management capability. All of them give to you a wide field of action.
So, you see that this flexible application can be used in both industrial and amateur conditions. It can be a great help in a solving of scientific or statistical problems or it can be used simply as interesting and educational software.
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Let GIPALS solve your problems!
Author: Zmiter Kovov
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