A taxonomy of indexing structures for mathematical programming modeling languages

The author proposes a taxonomy of the most commonly used indexing structures for mathematical programming modeling languages, and illustrates it with 25 examples stated in plain but precise English. The examples were designed with these criteria in mind: span the taxonomy of indexing structures; bring out clearly the important points requiring discussion in a thorough study of indexing; be simple yet obviously of practical relevance; demonstrate the main indexing capabilities of the leading modeling languages for mathematical programming; and be nonredundant, but build on one another when possible. The present work is an independently useful part of a full report (A.M. Geoffrion, 1989) which works all 25 examples in AMPL, GAMS, LINGO, and SML, and uses the results to evaluate the relative merits of these languages