This library allows the use of an external mathematical programming (LP, MIP or quadratic) solver from within ECLiPSe. It provides a largely solver-independent API to the programmer, so many programs will run with any supported external solver.
The library interfaces to both commercial and open-source solvers. Commercial solver will probably require a license to use the solver, while the open-source solvers are available free of charge, but are govererned by their own open-source licenses separate from ECLiPSe’s.
See section 10.11 for more details on the supported solvers.
The most generic way to load the library is:
:- lib(eplex).
This will try to load an appropriate external solver available on the computer.
It is also possible to request a specific solver explicitly, see section 10.11 for details.
Note that the ECLiPSe library described here is just an interface to an external solver. In order to be able to use it, you need to have access to a solver supported by the library. For commercial solvers, this requires a licence for the solver on your machine. For more details, see section 10.11. For open source solvers, the required solver library may be distributed with ECLiPSe if its licence allows this.