ICRON - Gurobi partnership brings true optimization power!

Today ICRON and Gurobi proudly announce the signing of a global partnership. This partnership brings new energy to the market. First of all, ICRON’s and Gurobi’s R&D specialists will join forces and knowledge in order to continuously improve the quality of the solution. They will the align more and more in the near future.

The partnership will bring serious customer benefits. For example, Gurobi updates will be automatically done within ICRON. Gurobi’s specialist will put emphasis on the specific problems ICRON consultants come across in the market. ICRON will add several Gurobi specific capabilities to the ICRON modeling engine, so the two products will be more integrated. Eventually this will provide customers the capacity to solve more complex problems, even faster.

• Frank Häger, Managing Director, EMEA - International Sales at Gurobi Optimization is enthusiastic about the partnership with ICRON: “ We know ICRON already for a long time and we worked on some projects together in the past. But now we are really going to join our R&D efforts, bringing true optimization power to the market. To deliver the best solver possible Gurobi is constantly looking to push the performance frontier for linear, quadratic, and mixed-integer programming forward while delivering the reliability and stability our clients demand. It’s clear that ICRON will help us in pushing this frontier”.
• Caner Taşkın, Chief Technology Officer of ICRON explains why ICRON and Gurobi are such a good match: “ For optimization there are very specific mathematical algorithms and software solutions that efficiently solve the problems, they are called solvers. Gurobi is one of these solvers. The reason why companies are interested in Gurobi, is simple: it’s the best solver in the market. Gurobi is on the ICRON radar for a long time now and they are getting better and better in specific benchmarks”.
• Caner Taşkın continues: “ With the start of the development of ICRON’s new software release we wanted to select one of the solvers as the embedded solver, so we can focus our R&D effort for getting better and better with the embedded solver. Also the next versions of the solver will be tuned for the ICRON needs. Gurobi is very receptive to the ICRON improvement suggestions, together we will continuously improve the solution and the customers will for sure benefit from this”.

Although ICRON prefers Gurobi, it is still possible to integrate other solvers with ICRON. For example, when there are very specific customers wishes or needs, or when the customer already has another solver installed.

About optimization and solvers

ICRON supports a number of problem solving techniques, some of them are heuristics, some are rule based algorithms and some are optimization algorithms. The specific type of optimization problems that we deal with are linear and integer mathematical problems. ICRON often uses such problem solving algorithms and modelling techniques for especially Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) and Capacity Planning (CP) tactical level of planning. The longer the time horizon is, a larger part of the network is involved and therefor the financial impact is significant. Even a small increment of for example just one percent change can have a serious long term financial impact. For these types of problems and challenges optimization provides a very good approach, because you know that the solution you get out of an optimization based algorithm is going to have a big impact on the overall solution quality. Other techniques like heuristics don’t deliver enough quality. If you are planning a value of for example billions of euro’s, then you need the best solution with the highest quality you can get.

About Gurobi

Gurobi is in the business of helping companies make better decisions through the use of prescriptive analytics. In addition to providing the best math programming solver, as well as tools for distributed optimization and optimization in the cloud, the company is known for its outstanding support and no-surprises pricing. That is all we do. We don’t have competing priorities and we don’t market applications that may compete with your own. We have one goal, and that goal is to make you successful with optimization.

Founded by arguably the most experienced and respected team in optimization today, Gurobi is rapidly growing as more and more companies see the benefits of working with a partner so focused on providing the best solver and the best support possible.