On the use of integer programming versus evolutionary solver in spreadsheet optimization

The introduction of the evolutionary solver in Frontline Systems' Premium Solver for Education allows students to use any functions in Excel for modeling optimization problems. As a result, instructors teaching optimization now face a dilemma of how much emphasis to place on “traditional” integer programming versus the unrestricted but heuristic approach of the evolutionary solver. Our goal in this work is to shed some light on the tradeoffs in these two modeling approaches. We discuss some experimental results comparing the two approaches for a number of well-known problem types. We also report some observations of student performance with these two different approaches.