Mohit Tawarmalani presents on business optimization models at Westwood Lecture Series

Exterior of Westwood building.

Mohit Tawarmalani
Mohit Tawarmalani

Mohit Tawarmalani, the executive associate dean of faculty and Allison and Nancy Schleicher Chair in Management in the Mitch Daniels School of Business, presented “Optimization Beyond Convexity: Applications in Process Design, Networking and Pricing” at the Westwood Lecture Series on Dec. 4.

Abstract. The great fault-line in optimization lies between convexity and non-convexity, the line that divides tractable problems from seemingly treacherous ones. In this talk, Tawarmalani will explore optimization algorithms for nonconvex models that arise from widely disparate sources such as consumer behavior, unpredictability of networks and equilibria of vapor-liquid phases. These models play an important role in decision contexts involving pricing of products, resiliency of operations and design of sustainable processes. He will briefly describe unifying advances, both in higher dimensional embeddings and convexification, that enable solution of practical instances and will conclude with insights into vertical differentiation, operations and leader-follower games.

Bio. Mohit Tawarmalani is the executive associate dean of faculty and Allison and Nancy Schleicher Chair of Management at the Mitch Daniels School of Business. He is also the academic director for the Krenicki Center for Business Analytics and Machine Learning. Tawarmalani’s research interests are at the interface of computer science, optimization and operations research with applications in business and engineering. He serves as an associate editor for the SIAM Journal on Optimization, Journal of Global Optimization and Mathematical Programming Computation. He was co-author of “Convexification and Global Optimization in Continuous and Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming” (Springer) and BARON, a software package widely used for global optimization. His research has been awarded the INFORMS Computing Society Prize, the Beale – Orchard Hays Prize from the Mathematical Optimization Society and the Computing in Chemical Engineering award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Tawarmalani received a PhD and master’s degree in industrial engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.