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"Thursday, February 5, 2009 IEOR Tools interview with GUSEK developer Luis Bettoni One of the great traits of developing software in the Open Source community is that you can build on the successes of others. Luiz Bettoni has done just that with his linear programming tool known as GUSEK. Recently Luiz released version 0.2.2 of GUSEK to the community. GUSEK is a linear programming modeling interface to the GLPK. GUSEK is freely availabe to download. It is designed for the a Windows operating system. IEOR Tools wanted to know more about GUSEK and is happy to have Luiz answer some questions about GUSEK and his contribution to the field of Linear Programming and Operations Research. What is your experience in Operations Research and/or Management Science and your background? I'm a Brazilian researcher and Master's student in the CPGEI department (Graduate School in Electrical Engineering and Industrial Computer Science) at UTFPR University. I'm actually working on two optimization projects to help in decision making. The first is focused in power distribution networks maintenance which is a partnership with COPEL (the energy company of Paraná State). The other one is a PETROBRAS (the world's 7th biggest oil company) with oil distribution scheduling. The first project was my first contact with Operations Research, about a year ago. What is your experience with GLPK? One COPEL project requirement is to use free software to solve LP/MILP models. After some research and a lot of tests GLPK was the natural choice: fast (not like commercial solvers, but better than other open source options), customizable, flexible, has its own modeling language (the GMPL) and is under constant development. Why did you want to create GUSEK? Developing GMPL models without any resources (just with Windows Notepad) was a challenge. To make our job affordable and to save costs we made a custom IDE integrating the GLPK stand-alone solver and the GMPL programming language into a customizable