7. A tangible machine-readable storage medium having instructions recorded thereon for at least one processor, the instructions comprising: instructions for providing a facility for specifying a model associated with a problem, the facility providing for the specifying of the model via a common-language-specification-compliant modeling language, an intermediate format, and a standardized application program interface, the common-language-specification-compliant modeling language ensuring interoperability by defining a set of features that solver developers can rely on to be available; instructions for providing a facility for translating the specified model in the common-language-specification-compliant modeling language to the intermediate format; instructions for providing the model to one of a plurality of solvers for solving the problem, the model being provided to the one of the plurality of solvers as input in the intermediate format; and instructions for collecting a solution produced by the one of the plurality of solvers and reporting a result.
7. A tangible machine-readable storage medium having instructions recorded thereon for at least one processor, the instructions comprising: instructions for providing a facility for specifying a model associated with a problem, the facility providing for the specifying of the model via a common-language-specification-compliant modeling language, an intermediate format, and a standardized application program interface, the common-language-specification-compliant modeling language ensuring interoperability by defining a set of features that solver developers can rely on to be available; instructions for providing a facility for translating the specified model in the common-language-specification-compliant modeling language to the intermediate format; instructions for providing the model to one of a plurality of solvers for solving the problem, the model being provided to the one of the plurality of solvers as input in the intermediate format; and instructions for collecting a solution produced by the one of the plurality of solvers and reporting a result. 9. The tangible machine-readable storage medium of claim 7 , wherein the instructions further comprise: instructions for binding a parameter for a model to a data source; and instructions for binding a decision from a model to a data sink.