Non-proprietary Optimization

by MNM for ASCEND

ASCEND is a modeling environment with a number of integrated solvers, used to model complex engineering problems. Among others, it includes a wrapper for CONOPT - a commercial optimization tool. CONOPT a being commercial product cannot be packaged with ASCEND for free distribution and the lack of a free, good optimization tool limits the utility of ASCEND. This can be bettered by including a wrapper for IPOPT and adding support for Hessian Matrices followed by tight integration.