Error Handling

The external solver's optimization can abort without completely solving the problem, because of some error, or some resource limit was reached. Eplex classifies these into the following cases, with default ways of handling them:

suboptimal

This means that a solution was found but it may be suboptimal. The default behaviour is to print a warning and succeed.

unbounded

This means that the problem is unbounded. The default behaviour is to bind Cost to infinity (positive or negative depending on the optimisation direction), print a warning and succeed. CAUTION: No solution values are computed when the problem is unbounded, so unless the problem was set up with the solution(no) option, an error will occur when trying to continue as if the optimisation had succeeded.

unknown

This means that due to the solution method chosen, it is unknown whether the problem is unbounded or infeasible. The default behaviour is to print a warning and fail (even though this may be logically wrong!).

abort

Some other error condition occurred during optimisation. The default behaviour is to print an error and abort.

The default behaviours can be overridden for each problem by giving a user defined goal to handle each case during problem setup in eplex_solver_setup/4 (lp_setup/4, lp_demon_setup/5, or later with eplex_set/2 or lp_set/3) as an option. If given, the user defined goal will be executed instead. The user defined handler could for instance change parameter settings and call lp_solve again.

The default behaviour is implemented by raising the events eplex_suboptimal, eplex_unbounded, eplex_unknown and eplex_abort for the different abort cases. These events can themselves be redefined to change the default behaviours. However, as this changes the behaviour globally, it is not recommended.