Introduction

Conic programs are a class of convex nonlinear optimization problems which use cones to represent the nonlinearities. They have the form:

\[\begin{align} & \min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^n} & f_0(x) \\ & \;\;\text{s.t.} & f_j(x) \in \mathcal{S}_j & \;\; j = 1 \ldots m \end{align}\]

Mixed-integer conic programs (MICPs) are extensions of conic programs in which some (or all) of the decision variables take discrete values.

How to choose a solver

JuMP supports a range of conic solvers, although support differs on what types of cones each solver supports. In the list of Supported solvers, "SOCP" denotes solvers supporting second-order cones and "SDP" denotes solvers supporting semidefinite cones. In addition, solvers such as SCS and Mosek have support for the exponential cone. Moreover, due to the bridging system in MathOptInterface, many of these solvers support a much wider range of exotic cones than they natively support. Solvers supporting discrete variables start with "(MI)" in the list of Supported solvers.

Tip

Duality plays a large role in solving conic optimization models. Depending on the solver, it can be more efficient to solve the dual instead of the primal. If performance is an issue, see the Dualization tutorial for more details.

How these tutorials are structured

Having a high-level overview of how this part of the documentation is structured will help you know where to look for certain things.

The following tutorials are worked examples that present a problem in words, then formulate it in mathematics, and then solve it in JuMP. This usually involves some sort of visualization of the solution. Start here if you are new to JuMP.
- Experiment design
- Logistic regression
The Tips and tricks tutorial contains a number of helpful reformulations and tricks you can use when modeling conic programs. Look here if you are stuck trying to formulate a problem as a conic program.
The remaining tutorials are less verbose and styled in the form of short code examples. These tutorials have less explanation, but may contain useful code snippets, particularly if they are similar to a problem you are trying to solve.