1. Benchmarking GAMS MINLP Solvers and Excel Solver
The Campaign for McMaster University
The Campaign for McMaster University
Benchmarking GAMS MINLP Solvers and Excel Solver
Miaodi Sun, Elkafi Hassini
School of Computational Science and Engineering, DeGroote School of Business McMaster University

2. The Campaign for McMaster University
Motivation
Spreadsheets-based solvers (SBS) have been mostly used by practitioners. Lately there is a growing interest in these platforms from academics as well.
However, SBSs have not been tested systematically for solving MINLPs due to the closed-source nature of SBSs and the lack of standard test libraries.

3. The Campaign for McMaster University
Project Overview
The purpose of our project is to alleviate some of these difficulties. We are working on developing a tool(GAMS2XLS) that would allow the conversion of GAMS files to a format that readily interacts with Excel solver platforms. Subsequently, we will use this tool to test Excel solvers against common MINLP solvers that are available through GAMS.