The German Operations Research Society (GOR) awards every year a price for outstanding dissertations in the field of Operations Research. The prize is endowed with 2000€, sponsored by Siemens AG, and handed over at the society's annual meeting, which in this year was jointly organized with the Belgian Operations Research Society in Brussels. On the occassion of OR2018, four theses were selected by the prize committee: "Logistics networks with intermediate stops – Designing innovative and
green solutions" by Maximilian Schiffer (RWTH Aachen), "Branch-and-Price-and-Cut Algorithms for Two Vehicle Routing Problems" by Ann-Kathrin Rothenbächer (Johannes-Gutenberg-U Mainz), "Robust Evacuation Planning for Urban Areas" by Marc Maiwald (U Duisburg-Essen), and "Exploiting structure in non-convex quadratic optimization" by Jonas
Schweiger (TU Berlin/ZIB).
Jonas Schweiger's thesis advances the theory of non-convex quadratic optimization by a novel Reformulation-Linearization-Technique (RLT), by strong valid inequalities for quadratic optimization over the standard simplex, and by providing a complete description for a version of the standard McCormick relaxation for quadratic programming; these developments have been implemented in both academic and commercial solvers and prove to be highly successful in gas network optimization.
The photo shows (from left to right) Jonas Schweiger, Maximilian Schiffer, the head of the Prize Committee Prof. Dr. Peter Letmathe, Marc Maiwald, and Ann-Kathrin Rothenbächer. Congratulations!
