MPS, Mathematical Programming System, an industry-standard format based on ASCII-text has historically been restricted to a fixed format in which data fields were limited to eight characters and specific fields had to appear in specific columns on specific lines. ILOG CPLEX supports extensions to MPS that allow more descriptive names (that is, more than eight characters), greater accuracy for numeric data, and greater flexibility in data positions.

Most MPS files in fixed format conform to the ILOG CPLEX extensions and thus can be read by the ILOG CPLEX MPS reader without error. However, the ILOG CPLEX MPS reader will not accept the following conventions:

You can convert fixed-format MPS files that contain those conventions into acceptable ILOG CPLEX-extended MPS files. To do so, use the convert utility supplied in the standard distribution of ILOG CPLEX. The convert utility removes unreadable features from fixed-format MPS, BAS, and ORD files. It runs from the operating system prompt of your platform. Here is the syntax of the convert utility:

convert -option inputfilename outputfilename