AMPL

AMPL, an acronym for "A Mathematical Programming Language", is an algebraic modeling language for describing and solving high-complexity problems for large-scale mathematical computation (i.e. large-scale optimization and scheduling-type problems). It was developed by Robert Fourer, David Gay and Brian Kernighan at Bell Laboratories. AMPL supports dozens of solvers, both open source and commercial, including CBC, CPLEX, FortMP, Gurobi, MINOS, IPOPT, SNOPT, KNITRO, and LGO. Problems are passed to solvers as nl files. AMPL is used by more than a hundred corporate clients. It is also used by government agencies and academic institutions.

One particular advantage of AMPL is the similarity of its syntax to the mathematical notation of optimization problems. This allows for a very concise and readable definition of problems in the domain of optimization. Many modern solvers available on the NEOS server (formerly hosted at the Argonne National Laboratory, currently hosted at the University of Wisconsin, Madison) accept AMPL input. According to the NEOS statistics AMPL is the most popular format for representing mathematical programming problems.