PDFO

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

PDFO (Powell’s Derivative-Free Optimization solvers) is an open-source, high-performance interface that wraps the legendary derivative-free optimization solvers developed by Professor M. J. D. Powell. Rather than a reimplementation, PDFO serves as a cross-platform wrapper around the original, highly optimized Fortran backends, making them natively accessible to modern computing environments.

PDFO aims at solving general nonlinear optimization problems of the form:

$$\min_{x \in \mathcal{X}} \quad f (x)$$

where the constraints defining the feasible set $\mathcal{X} \subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$ depend entirely on the underlying Powell solver selected to execute the task:

Fortran on Tom Ragonneau

PDFO