3/25/2015
Written by
Illinois Distinguished Lecture Series in Operations Research
Integer Programming: The Global Impact
A Lecture by George Nemhauser
The A. Russell Chandler Chaired Professor
H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
4:00 pm
NCSA Auditorium
Reception Immediately Following in the NCSA Atrium
Abstract
Integer programming is the (not very appealing or descriptive) name for optimization models and algorithms in which some variables are required to have integer values. Planning and operational problems in energy, finance, health, manufacturing, military, transportation, and in almost any imaginable domain where decisions are made, are formulated and solved using integer programming. Currently available software is capable of solving models with thousands, and sometimes millions, of variables and constraints. Most Fortune 500 companies use integer programming in some aspects of their business. We will review the development of integer programming algorithms and applications, discuss some integer programming models whose solutions have had big impact in solving important problems, and present recent progress that has made it possible to solve very large instances and to obtain provably good solutions quickly. We’ll close by speculating on future advances in methodology and applications.
Biography
George Nemhauser is the A. Russell Chandler Chaired Professor in ISyE at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received a Ph.D. in operations research from Northwestern University in 1961, and joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University where he remained until 1969. In 1970, he joined Cornell University as a professor in operations research and industrial engineering and served as school director from 1977 to 1983. He has held visiting faculty positions at the University of Leeds, U.K., and the University of Louvain, Belgium. He has served the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) as council member, president, and editor of Operations Research, and he is past chair of the Mathematical Programming Society. He was the founding editor of Operations Research Letters, and co-editor of Handbooks of Operations Research and Management Science.
Dr. Nemhauser has served various governmental agencies, including NSF, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Research Council (NRC). He was a member of the NRC's Board of Mathematical Sciences. His honors and awards include membership in the National Academy of Engineering, the Kimball Medal, the Lanchester Prize (twice awarded), Morse lecturer of ORSA, Fellow of INFORMS and SIAM, Khachiyan prize in optimization and von Neumann theory prize of INFORMS.
His current research interests are in applications involving large-scale mixed-integer programming problems and robust optimization. He is actively working on several problems including maritime inventory routing for Exxon-Mobil and AGV routing for Samsung. He is a partner in the Sports Scheduling Group, which schedules various college leagues and major league baseball.