OR/MS Today - June 1998

June 1998

INFORMS News:
Fred Glover Wins von Neumann Prize

Each year, INFORMS awards the John von Neumann Theory Prize to a scholar who has made outstanding contributions to the theory of operations research and management science. The award acknowledges extraordinary contributions within the fields that have stood the test of time.
This year, the prize was awarded to Fred W. Glover for his fundamental contributions to integer programming, networks and combinatorial optimization.

Leon Lasdon, chair of the John von Neumann Theory Prize Committee, made the presentation.

Glover's contributions to integer programming began with his dissertation at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1965, where he introduced surrogate constraints and improved data structure for implicit enumeration. In 1970, the surrogate constraint ideas led him to a family of facet generation algorithms for Gomory's group problem, now known as lifting procedures.

His research in the early-to mid-1970s led to the polyhedral annexation framework, fundamental in disjunctive programming. As with surrogates, lifting procedures and convexity cuts, this framework became an important part of integer programming, withstanding the test of time for more than two decades in its impact on the ability to solve hard problems.

Starting in the 1970s, Glover and Darwin Klingman revolutionized the field of network optimization. They developed new data structures, algorithms and computer implementations which vastly improved the speed and size capabilities of network codes.

They specialized their primal, dual and primal-dual procedures to important categories of network problems like transportation and assignment. In the best traditions of OR/MS, they pioneered many important applications, and played a major role in disseminating this technology to practitioners.

In the 1980s they introduced the family of modeling concepts known as Netforms, and later published a seminal book on that topic. This approach includes elements of what is now called reformation in optimization modeling. Glover has also provided results regarding reformation of LPs as networks, and binary IPs as LPs.

Starting in the late 1970s, Glover developed the framework of the metaheuristic called "Tabu Search," which has had an enormous impact on the capabilities to solve hard combinatorial problems. He coined both "Metaheuristic" and "Tabu Search" in the same 1986 article that has spawned hundreds of Tabu Search-related applications throughout the world.

In many areas, ranging from scheduling to financial planning to training neural networks, Tabu Search has solved or quickly obtained a high-quality solution for problems that were too difficult to tackle by other methods. The success of Tabu Search relative to competing techniques like genetic algorithms and simulated annealing continues to grow.

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