Number of variables limit in bintprog

Hello everyone,

does anyone know why there is a limit at the number of variables (i.e. 65535) in function bintprog?

If the problem that you are trying to solve has more variables the function cannot solve it and outputs the error message:

"Error using bintprog

The size of the problem is too large for the current solver."

The reason is not clear to me.

[Matt J]

Roger Commented

I am having the same problem. Does any one have a work around?

Answer 1

[Matt J]

If you are running 32-bit OS and MATLAB, maybe it would go away if yo upgrade to 64-bit. Or maybe if you upgrade your MATLAB version to at least R2013b. I have no problem running problems of that size, e.g.,

>> N=65535; f=ones(1,N); x=bintprog(f);
Optimization terminated.

However, you should realize that a problem of this size could have a complexity of 2^N, see Limits of the Algorithm here,

http://www.mathworks.com/help/optim/ug/binary-integer-programming-algorithms.html#f786287