We are delighted to announce that our Assistant Professor Dr Zhang Zaikun and his team have been honored with the Award for Applications of Operations Research by the Operations Research Society of China (ORSC), recognizing their significant contributions to industry through the development of numerical optimization solvers. These solvers are designed to solve nonlinear optimization problems without using derivatives (more generally, first-order information), known as derivative-free optimization (DFO) solvers.
Dr Zhang and his team (Tom M. Ragonneau, Haitian Li, and Cunxin Huang) have devoted many years to the development DFO packages, including NEWUOAs, PRIMA, COBYQA, and PDFO. These packages have made significant impacts in industry.
NEWUOAs was applied by Intel to the design of the 5G base chip Atom P5900, which is now a flagship product of Intel. It drastically reduced the optimization time of a memory design problem from weeks to hours, which massively simplified the workflow of the design. Meanwhile, the State Key Laboratory of ASIC and Systems (Fudan University) applied NEWUOAs to large-scale circuit design, tackling bottleneck problems that were previously unsolvable or even unimaginable.
PRIMA and PDFO play pivotal roles at IRT Saint Exupéry, a French industrial research lab co-founded by major industry players including Airbus. They are essential for optimizing critical aerospace and automotive systems, aiding IRT in making crucial decisions in areas such as aircraft component design and electrical systems for electric vehicles.
Notably, the COBYQA solver has been integrated into SciPy as a Release Highlight of SciPy 1.14.0. It is hence downloaded millions of times every day along with SciPy, which is at the core of Python’s scientific computing capabilities. The SciPy community is now actively working on the inclusion of PRIMA solvers into SciPy. In addition, PDFO is a major optimization engine in GEMSEO, which is an industrial software package developed by IRT Saint Exupéry. NEWUOAs is incorporated into the toolkit for large-scale analog circuit optimization by Fudan University.
For more information about Dr Zhang’s solvers, see www.libprima.net, www.cobyqa.com, and www.pdfo.net. Dr. Zhang’s team is supported by Hong Kong Research Grant Council projects PolyU15305420, PolyU15306621, and PolyU15308623.
About the Award
The Operations Research Society of China established the Award for Applications of Operations Research in 2002 to encourage the application and practice of operations research in China, thereby benefiting the nation’s economic and social development. This goal is achieved by reviewing and recognizing outstanding projects in the field. The award is presented every two years during the society's academic annual meeting. Winners are selected through anonymous voting by the judges, with up to three projects being honored. AMA Chair Professor Sun Defeng and collaborators received this award in 2022.
For details, please visit https://www.orsc.org.cn/article/detail?id=926 (Chinese only).
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