Several pricing strategies for the simplex solvers are available. Pricing strategies determine which variable enters the basis at each simplex pivot. These can be controlled by specifying the PRICETYPE= option.

The primal simplex solver has the following five pricing strategies:

PARTIAL

scans a queue of decision variables to find an entering variable. You can optionally specify the QUEUESIZE= option to control the length of this queue.

FULL

uses Dantzig’s most violated reduced cost rule (Dantzig; 1963). It compares the reduced cost of all decision variables, and selects the variable with the most violated reduced cost as the entering variable.

DEVEX

implements the Devex pricing strategy developed by Harris (1973).

STEEPESTEDGE

uses the steepest-edge pricing strategy developed by Forrest and Goldfarb (1992).

HYBRID

uses a hybrid of the Devex and steepest-edge pricing strategies.

The dual simplex solver has only three pricing strategies available: FULL, DEVEX, and STEEPESTEDGE.