History related to the creation versus using existing Optmization Interface Libraries? about ifopt HOT 1 CLOSED

Hi Levi!

Yes, there are a few interfaces out there, but i have only briefly looked into them. IFOPTs focus is on making the problem formulation (constraint, jacobian, index management) easy (see this picture, which shows the core feature of "sets") and efficient by building everything on Eigen. It's 2k lines that have no dependencies except Eigen and IPOPT (both installable with sudo apt-get...). So its a low dependency, minimum implementation that can be installed hassle free.

Casadi on the other hand will have a bunch of additional features, like AD and other handy things, so you just have to see what you need. COIN-OR is pure IPOPT as far as i know, I don't know of any interface on top of it.

I'd recommend to install and run this example.cc which should give you a good feeling how problems are formulated with IFOPT and then do the same for the other interfaces to compare.

Hope this helps :)
Cheers
Alex

from ifopt.