The most powerful optimization add-in for Excel is now even stronger. Thousands of users have found the ease and flexibility of the Excel coupled with the industrial grade solvers in What’sBest! to be the perfect combination for their optimization modeling. And with this new release, What’sBest! just got better.

New Stochastic Programming Option

Incorporate risk into multi-stage optimization models, maximize expected profit, and summarize results in histograms showing the distribution of possible profit, etc. This new option allows modeling and optimization for models with uncertain elements via multistage stochastic linear, nonlinear and integer stochastic programming (SP). Benders decomposition is used for solving large linear SP models. Deterministic equivalent method is used for solving nonlinear and integer SP models. Support is available for over 20 distribution types (discrete or continuous).

Statistical Sampling

Sample directly from various statistical distributions. Variance reduction with Latin-Hyper-Cube and Anti-thetic variates sampling. Generation of correlated samples via Pearson, Spearman, or Kendall correlation measures. Pseudo random uniform generation via a choice of three different generators.

Faster Linear Solvers

Large linear models solve an average of 20% faster with improved Primal and Dual Simplex solvers.

Substantial Integer Solver Improvements

The Integer Solver is an average of 50% faster on a broad range of integer models. Substantial improvements have been made to all heuristics for finding close to optimal solutions quickly. There have also been significant improvements in cut generation for certain types of special model structures.

Global Solver Improvements

Find the best solution to those challenging, nonconvex, nonlinear problems such as in engineering design.

Support of Excel version 2007’s Expanded Number of Rows and Columns

What’sBest! models can be laid out over a larger area to take advantage of the increased rows and columns in Excel 2007. The maximum number of rows and columns are 16384 columns and 1048576 rows.

List Best Solutions to Integer Models

A new feature allows What’sBest! to return a list of the best solutions to integer models. The user can scroll through the solutions, examine them, and select the one of most interest based on the value of a tradeoff variable.

Support for Semi-continuous Variables and Special Ordered Sets

Easily specify piecewise linear functions such as in quantity discount purchasing. Semi-continuous variables can take a value of 0 or lie within some non-negative range. Special Ordered Sets (SOS) are sets of binary variables that are of type SOS1 (at most one nonzero), SOS2 (at most two nonzero and adjacent) and SOS3 (variables must sum to 1).

Cardinality Constraints

Efficiently represent multiple choice, k out of n decisions.

K-Best Solutions

Quickly view a number of optimal and near optimal solutions in multi-criteria decision-making.

Smarter Recognition of Quadratic Expressions

Get much faster solution times for wide range of portfolio-like problems such as Value-at-Risk.

New Multiple Language Support

The user can specify the language for the What’sBest! menu and error messages to be English, French or Chinese.

 

For general information on What'sBest!'s capabilities, visit our What’sBest! product page. To try a limited capacity version of What’sBest!, see our download page. To order a copy of What’sBest! or update an older version, go to our order page.