Microsoft Solver Foundation 1.1 Standard Edition

Solver Foundation is a Microsoft framework designed to deliver critical business insight tools to CxOs, quantitative analysts and developers of mission-critical systems. Traditionally referred to as mathematical programming, these tools provide business intelligence and planning support to organizations seeking maximal competitive advantage.
Whether helping to schedule large conferences, optimize global supply chains or derive maximal profit for services such as online advertizing and portfolio management – Solver Foundation provides the modeling, solving and programming tools. Built entirely with Microsoft’s .NET technologies and able to seamlessly integrate third party solver technologies (new in version 1.1), Solver Foundation provides a complete solution tool chain. Solver Foundation also provides a high productivity environment for information workers and analysts in addition to deep support for developers. Critical business and engineering decision making can be integrated back into the systems that drive profit and competitive advantage in record time. Companies and organizations needing the best and most efficient tools to stay competitive have a new toolset stretching from Office through Visual Studio to their production environments: Solver Foundation.

Solver Foundation is a pure, managed code runtime for mathematical programming, modeling, and optimization. This .NET/CLR based framework provides a rich set of tools, services, and engines to aid companies in their continuous quest for operational efficiency, profit maximization, and risk management. Solver Foundation is designed to help businesses make strategic decisions. It affords its users the advantage of easy to use tools, numerically stable solver technologies and deep integration with ubiquitous information worker systems like Microsoft Office.

Solver Foundation uses a declarative programming model, consisting of simple compatible elements that are solved by application of solvers, meta-heuristics, search techniques, and combinatorial optimization mechanisms to accelerate the solution finding process. Building a model in Solver Foundation is as simple as specifying the decisions to be made, constraints to be respected, the goals to be used to evaluate candidate proposals (solutions) and the data to be processed by the model (historical or projected parameters). This can be done from any CLS-compatible language and the modeler does not need to understand anything about the details of solver technologies or search strategies. The separation of concerns is total, providing a high degree of modularity.