| ICS Prize
The ICS Prize is an Annual award for best English language paper on the OR/CS interface. The award is accompanied by a certificate and a $1,000 honorarium. Objectives:
2004 ICS Prize Winners:
Nikolaos V. Sahinidis and Mohit Tawarmalani
for their contributions to the field of Nonlinear global optimization
summarized in their book Convexification and Global Optimization in
Continuous and Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming, and embodied in the
BARON software package
The work embodied in this book and the BARON software package comprises
a path-breaking advance in the theory and computational practice of
optimizing nonconvex nonlinear models. Mathematical programming methods
have traditionally only been able to compute local optima of such
models, and practitioners seeking global optima had to resort to a
variety of heuristic and ad hoc techniques. This work, drawing on
original contributions of the authors and the work of many other
researchers, addresses the computation of provably global optima by
bringing together a variety of mathematical programming techniques
ranging from branch and bound to convex analysis. It thus unites a
number of traditionally separate research areas in creating an enabling
technology for new application fields. The book also includes
interesting engineering applications, with computational results giving
persuasive proof of the work's usefulness. Given the challenging nature
of the models it addresses, the success of BARON is remarkable. Work of
this nature opens up new applications for the future of mathematical
programming.
Ignacio Grossman
for his many contributions to
Nonlinear Mixed Integer Programming and Process Design
Ignacio Grossman has made fundamental contributions to the theory and
practice of mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP). His pioneering
paper with Marco Duran on the Outer Approximation (OA) decomposition
algorithm showed that it dominated Generalized Benders Decomposition for
a large and important class of MINLP's. He was instrumental in
developing the DICOPT implementation of OA, coupling it to the GAMS
modeling language, and extending its logic to deal with problems that
are non-convex in the continuous variables. DICOPT is now one of the
most widely used MINLP solvers, and is largely responsible for making
MINLP a viable tool for practical problem solving.
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