Premium Solver - What's New in Version 10.x

NEW!  Premium Solver has full support for 32-bit and 64-bit Excel 2010, as well as Excel 2007.  These are the biggest Excel upgrades in at least 10 years, with everything from a new "ribbon" based user interface to huge worksheets with 16,384 columns and 1,048,576 rows - far beyond the 256 column and 65,536 row limits in previous Excel releases. This makes it much easier to lay out your models on a worksheet, without having to split up large tables of information.

NEW!  Premium Solver V10.x includes Guided Mode, a new facility to help you understand and use the software's advanced capabilities.  You can also get online Help for every Solver Result message and error message in the Output pane, every Platform option and Solver Engine option, and every element of your optimization model in the Task Pane Model tab.  The V10.x startup screen, which appears during your initial trial, includes links to open Help or the User Guide, open a wide range of example worksheet models, or watch our video tutorials.

Recent!  Premium Solver V10.x includes new facilities for sensitivity analysis of your Excel model, that can be used before even starting an optimization or simulation model.  It is especially easy to identify the model parameters with the most impact on your computed results – you can simply select any formula cell, and choose Parameters – Identify from the Ribbon to quickly find the input cells with the greatest impact on this formula, ranked and shown in a Tornado chart.

You can choose some of these input cells to serve as Sensitivity Parameters, and then produce reports and charts that show the impact on computed results of varying these parameters over a range you specify.

Improved!  The V10.x Evolutionary Solver has many improvements in its algorithms, 'balance of effort' heuristics, and stopping rules.  As usual with NSP problems, performance is very model-dependent – but solutions can be several times faster on certain models.

Improved!  Premium Solver V10.x uses InstallShield 2010 technology and code-signing to simplify installation in many corporate environments.  It uses a new license manager, from Reprise Software, that offers simpler and more reliable trial licenses, plus the convenience of Internet-based license activation.  For customers with Flexible Use (“concurrent user”) licenses, we have a new License Server to work with this license manager.

New and Unique with V10.5! Managing Solutions for Multiple Optimization and Simulation Problems
Users who build optimization or simulation models frequently want to solve many instances of these models with different data or parameters. For some time, Frontline’s Solvers have made it easy to solve multiple problem instances, but as with other software, the final solutions were obtained in memory and had to be used immediately for analysis or creating reports. V10.5 introduces an XML-based solution file that makes it easy to solve multiple problem instances on any machine, save, transfer and load solutions, and use solutions for analysis and reporting on any machine where Frontline’s software is running.

Enhanced in V10.5! Improved Support for Shared Probability Distributions
In V10.5, Frontline continues its leading-edge support for shared probability distributions, used in simulation and stochastic optimization applications, stored in the DIST 1.1 format described at www.probabilitymanagement.org – an emerging standard now supported by other software vendors such as Oracle and SAS. In Risk Solver Platform V10.5, it is easier than ever to produce and consume arrays of DIST-based probability distributions in a model, and use them in ultra-fast Monte Carlo simulations in Excel – 10 to 100 times faster than most other software.

What's New in Other Recent Versions

Improved!  Premium Solver can deliver multiple solutions, not just a single best solution, for integer programming and global optimization problems. The best integer solutions ('incumbents') for MIP problems, locally optimal solutions for global optimization problems, or best final population members for non-smooth problems solved with the Evolutionary Solver can be viewed in a worksheet report, or easily accessed in your VBA code via the new object-oriented API.

New!  Premium Solver supports a new, optional style for defining optimization models with functions on the worksheet. You can move easily between the traditional interactive modeling style and the new functions such as PsiVar(), PsiObj() and PsiCon(), or between the new functions for optimization and Risk Solver Engine's functions for simulation.

New!  Interactive Optimization enables Premium Solver to re-optimize your model each time you change a number on the spreadsheet. For small to medium size models, this is not only a convenience - it can be a real decision aid: You'll find that insights about your model, and decisions you can make, start to flow intuitively, when you can quickly see the impact of changing a parameter on the optimal solution.

New API!  Premium Solver features a new objected-oriented API (application programming interface), accessible from Excel VBA, that matches the object-oriented API of the Solver Platform SDK, our flagship product for developing optimization and simulation using modern programming languages such as C#, C++, VB.NET, Java and MATLAB. The new API makes it much easier to develop powerful custom applications in Excel, and to move applications from Excel to a programming language.

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