GPOPS

Open-Source General Pseudospectral Optimal Control Software

Version 4.x of GPOPS Has Been Released!

Gainesville, FL, 3 August 2011: The developers of GPOPS are happy to announce the official release of version 4.x of the software. As those who have used GPOPS may be aware, over the past two years we have been focusing our attention on the hp-adaptive version of GPOPS. The 3.x versions of GPOPS implemented highly experimental versions of the hp-adaptive methods. In keeping with our philosophy that we want to keep a high-quality software for public consumption, we have written a new version of hp-adaptive GPOPS. This new version runs significantly smoother and faster than the version currently available. Version 4.1 is now available for public download by clicking here.

Gainesville, FL, 10 August 2011: A number of indexing bugs were found soon after the release of GPOPS 4.0. As a result, the authors of GPOPS have released an update of the software to version 4.1. No changes have been made to the way in which a user codes the problem. For details on the coding syntax, users are referred to the GPOPS User’s Manual which can be obtained by clicking here. Again, the software can be obtained by clicking here.

Changes to GPOPS from Version 3.x

A number of syntactical changes have been made in GPOPS version 4.x from GPOPS 3.x. These changes are summarized as follows:

  • The parameters required to specify the parameters for the mesh refinement have been reduced greatly. See Section 3 (page 20) of the GPOPS User’s Manual.
  • When using analytic derivatives, the order in which the derivatives are supplied has changed so that derivatives with respect to parameters come after derivatives with respect to time. See Section 4.2 on page 21 of the GPOPS User’s Manual.
  • Two solution outputs are now provided. The output “solution” is a structure that contains the solution at the discretization points, while “solutionPlot” is a structure that contains the solution for plotting purposes. The output “solutionPlot” is a Lagrange polynomial interpolation of “solution”, where the Lagrange polynomials correspond to those used to approximate the state.
  • The nomenclature for the finite-difference derivative option has changed. If a user wants to use finite-difference, the option is now “setup.derivatives=‘finite-difference’”. This option was previously “setup.derivatives=‘numerical’”.