ILOG CPLEX Optimization Software Turns 20
October 15 2008 - 12:00AM
PR Newswire (US)
Software Delivers Dramatic ROI, Has Revolutionized the Way
Industries Operate WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --
INFORMS ANNUAL MEETING -- ILOG(R) (Nasdaq: ILOG; Euronext: ILO,
ISIN: FR0004042364) today announced ILOG CPLEX(R), the world's most
widely-used optimization software, is celebrating its 20th
anniversary this year. Used by more than 1,300 commercial
customers, including 160 members of the Global 500 and hundreds of
leading independent software vendors in supply chain, customer
relationship and asset management, ILOG CPLEX has revolutionized
the way companies do business in industries from energy to medical
devices by delivering dramatic returns on investment through
improved operational efficiency. The announcement was made today at
the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Washington, Oct. 12-15, 2008. Used by
operations research (OR) and management science professionals and
leveraged by corporate planning departments and operational teams,
optimization software improves business efficiency and decision
making by allowing businesses to calculate the best utilization of
existing resources and implement an action plan that can
potentially deliver millions of dollars in savings. Here are just a
few more examples of how ILOG CPLEX has revolutionized a range of
industries: -- CPLEX has transformed how the power industry solves
unit commitment problems by allowing for these problems to be
addressed in commercial software for the first time. Unit
commitment is the process of managing power station operating
times. For Red Electrica de Espana (REE) -- the company in charge
of managing the power supply systems in the Canary Islands,
Balearic Islands and the cities of Ceuta and Melilla -- CPLEX
enabled REE to reduce production costs by one to two percent, which
translates into savings of between 50,000 and 100,000 Euros per
day. At the same time, CPLEX helped REE reduce its carbon emissions
by two-and-a-half percent -- which represents approximately 100,000
tons of CO2 annually. -- CPLEX was instrumental in encouraging the
widespread adoption of optimization technology in the airline
industry by making it possible to solve real-world instances of
critical scheduling and planning problems efficiently and reliably.
At the United Parcel Service (UPS), CPLEX is used to optimize
routes, fleet assignments, and package flows for UPS Airlines. With
each plane costing in excess of $100 million, the long-term savings
in aircraft ownership costs are expected to exceed the savings in
operational costs. -- United States Postal Service (USPS) has
realized more than $10 million in savings to date by leveraging
ILOG CPLEX for a strategic transportation management initiative.
Developed by USPS and IBM, the Highway Corridor Analytic Program
(HCAP) uses advanced technology to analyze USPS highway
transportation scenarios and identify cost saving opportunities.
HCAP model uses ILOG CPLEX to identify the best allocation of mail
among transportation resources. "CPLEX has revolutionized how
operations research is done in practice. With CPLEX, the
applicability of optimization has increased by orders of
magnitude," said Michael Trick, professor of operations research,
Carnegie Mellon University. "For the past 20 years, CPLEX has been
a critical tool in a wide range of industries where OR plays a
vital role, and I expect it will continue to be a significant tool
for OR professionals for the next 20 years to come." Innovator in
Optimization Technology First unveiled in 1988, ILOG CPLEX's
arrival coincided with the desire of users to move from expensive
mainframe computers to workstations and personal computers to solve
their planning and scheduling problems. It also introduced many
industry firsts and performance innovations to the field of
optimization. -- It was the first commercial linear optimizer on
the market written in the C language, which made CPLEX highly
portable. This feature, combined with the industry's first Callable
Library, simplified application design by making it possible to
embed optimization into planning applications. -- Industry-first
enhancements to Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) algorithms in CPLEX
made it possible to solve complex problems tens of thousands of
variables in real-time, such as airline crew scheduling, where this
capability made real-time rescheduling possible in response to
weather or other events. -- Quadratic Programming (QP) and MIP
integration which allowed for the accurate assessment of risk in
the securities portfolio management industry. -- ILOG CPLEX(R) has
consistently broken performance records -- including its own. In
2007, it demonstrated version-over-version processing times more
than 10-times faster, on average, for the most complex business
problems -- enabling the software to address larger, more
complicated problems that were often unsolvable by previous
generations of optimization software. In fact, due to advances in
both hardware performance and algorithms, CPLEX can solve
optimization problems, in many cases, more than a million times
faster today than twenty years ago. For more information on CPLEX
history and milestones, please visit
http://www.ilog.com/products/cplex/news/history.cfm Leading
organizations worldwide use ILOG optimization tools and, engines to
solve the world's most challenging planning and scheduling
problems. These customers include APL, BNSF, JR East, Logistics,
Maersk, Schneider, SNCF, United Airlines, the United States Postal
Service and UPS in transportation and logistics; and Airbus, Coors,
Dell, Hansol Paper, Michelin, Mitsubishi Chemicals, Nippon Steel,
Nissan, Porsche, Saint Gobain, Thyssen Krupp, and Toyota in
manufacturing. ILOG optimization products are also used by a
majority of leading Supply Chain Management software vendors,
including Infor, Manhattan Associates, JDA, Oracle, Red Prairie and
SAP, as well as in research programs at over 1,000 universities
around the world, making the products the "gold standard" for
performance and solution quality in the Operations Research
community. For more information, please visit
http://www.ilog.com/products/optimization. ILOG ILOG delivers
software and services that empower customers to make better
decisions faster and manage change and complexity. Over 3,000
corporations and more than 465 leading software vendors rely on
ILOG's market-leading business rule management system (BRMS),
supply chain planning and scheduling applications, as well as its
optimization and visualization software components, to achieve
dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and
services, and sharpen their competitive edge. ILOG was founded in
1987 and employs more than 850 people worldwide. For more
information, please visit http://www.ilog.com/. ILOG and ILOG CPLEX
are registered trademarks of ILOG S.A. and ILOG Inc. All other
trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.
DATASOURCE: ILOG CONTACT: Monika Raj of ILOG, +1-408-991-7128, Web
site: http://www.ilog.com/
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