Solver Support - Recommended Books

Recommended Books

If you'd like to learn more about designing and solving optimization models for practical business problems, one of your best resources is a textbook aimed at current MBA students.  Frontline Systems has worked with the authors of more than a dozen management science textbooks -- on these pages, we'll tell you about some of our favorite choices.

If you'd like to learn more about programming the Excel Solver or using other analytical methods in VBA, or if you're curious about the advanced optimization methods used in Frontline Systems' Solver Engines, we have some unique resources to recommend to you.

We especially recommend the textbooks Management Science:  The Art of Modeling with Spreadsheets by Stephen G. Powell and Kenneth R. Baker, published by John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-470-03840-3, and Spreadsheet Modeling and Decision Analysis: A Practical Introduction to Management Science by Cliff T. Ragsdale, published by South-Western College Publishing, ISBN 0-324-31256-3.

• Management Science and Operations Research
• Spreadsheet Engineering and Controlling the Solver with VBA
• Advanced Methods Used by Frontline's Solvers

You can easily order these books from Amazon.com, "Earth's Biggest Bookstore."  Frontline participates in the Amazon.com Associates Program, through which we can "point" you directly to these books in Amazon.com's online catalog.

If you click the Ordering Info link for one of these books, then click "Add it to your Shopping Cart," Amazon.com will place a tentative order for the book.  Only when and if you "check out," confirm the order and supply your credit card and shipping address will this become a definite order. If you add the book to your shopping cart when you first click through, and later confirm the purchase, we receive a small commission on some of these books from Amazon.com.

Risk Solver Platform is an integrated superset of Premium Solver Platform and Risk Solver with best-of-breed simulation, best-of-breed optimization, and new stochastic programming and robust optimization capabilities you can't get anywhere else.

Premium Solver Platform, our premier tool for conventional optimization, uses new PSI Technology to automatically analyze and transform your Excel model. It solves every type and size of problem, using built-in and plug-in Solver Engines.

Premium Solver, our basic upgrade for the Excel Solver, solves up to 10X larger problems at much higher speed, and solves new kinds of problems with our Evolutionary Solver.

Risk Solver Platform is an integrated superset of Premium Solver Platform and Risk Solver with best-of-breed simulation, best-of-breed optimization, and new stochastic programming and robust optimization capabilities you can't get anywhere else.

Risk Solver Premium integrates all the features of Premium Solver and Risk Solver, with far superior optimization and higher performance, easier to use simulation, for about the same price as competitive products for Monte Carlo simulation.

Risk Solver is the easiest and fastest tool available for risk analysis of your Excel models, using Monte Carlo simulation. Evaluate thousands of scenarios in seconds, and see instantly updated charts and statistics, each time you ask "what if".

Software Developer Tools:

Solver Platform SDK makes it easy to solve any type or size of optimization problem in your Visual Basic, VB.NET, C/C++, C#, Java, or MATLAB program. And it's easy to deploy your application with our flexible licensing for software vendors and corporate developers.