Preface to Release 2.0

During its first year of public availability ABACUS reached a rather active community of users, which is growing slowly but constantly. Many of them contributed to making ABACUS more reliable. I want to thank all of them for their helpful feedback. In particular, I want to mention Max Böhm, who pointed me to several improvement possibilities.

But not only the users worked with ABACUS, also its development continued such that it is now ready for a second release. ABACUS 2.0 offers besides many minor extensions four major new features:

• the interface to the new LP-solver SoPlex
• the support of the Visual C++ compiler
• a generalized strong branching method
• increased safety against name collisions

In particular, I am very happy that the abstract LP-interface proved its usefulness during the integration of the LP-solver SoPlex. Since the adaption of the framework to the Visual C++ compiler could be performed, I am optimistic that also other compilers can be supported in the future.

Users who want to upgrade from version 1.2.x find the new features and the differences to previous versions in Section .

Köln, August 1997 Stefan Thienel