IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio Reviews & Insights

Most used features of this tool are modelling and solving linear and mixed-integer problems with more than 10,000 variables, shadow price analysis and visualization capabilities. Only issue is with non convex optimization capabilities.

In my opinon, if the problem is less than 5000 variables, one should try to solve with free available solver rather than directly going for a commercial license of IBM CPLEX Optimization Studio. In my opinion, if the priority is not in terms of solving time with higher number of variables, even then one can go for free solvers like CBC, IPOPT, SCIP. In my opinion, if priority is solving time and number of variables is also high, only in that case one should prefer going for a commercial license.

Our organization used IBM CPLEX Optimization Studio for solving large optimization problems in research and in demonstrations to students at the graduate level. We have more than 50 licenses for CPLEX and installed for Research and Laboratory Purposes. CPLEX addresses various business problems such as Integer Programming, Mixed Integer Programming, Quadratic Programming, etc.

It is well suited for solving large-sized, mixed-integer, and integer programming problems. Now, the new version supports for Multi-Objective optimization along with some new algorithms such as Benders Decomposition. It is less appropriate for quadratic programming problems where the objective function is the product of multiple variables. However, it's very easy to code any problem.