IBM is a company that provides software and services for business planning and operation. In particular, it develops the IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimizer, a mathematical programming software, which has been used at ZIB since many years in a number of projects.

The long standing expertise on mathematical programming at ZIB and the software expertise of IBM are the basis of a cooperation project. In this project, joint research is conducted with the goal of a direct utilization in suitable application areas of commerce and industry.

Within the cooperation we have already implemented {0,1/2}-cuts and the enumeration of all solutions for small binary programs. Another joint project has been succesfully finished only recently: Given a general MIP instance, the goal is to detect multi-commodity flow structures (coupled node-arc incidence matrices), to extract the underlying graph, and then to apply special purpose cutting plane procedures that exploit the detected network structure.

• IBM (Tobias Achterberg)