Hanif D. Sherali

The 2008 Lanchester Prize is awarded jointly to Warren P. Adams and Hanif D. Sherali for a series of papers, including “A Hierarchy of Relaxations Leading to the Convex Hull Representation for General Discrete Optimization Problems”.

The work of Adams and Sherali consists of a series of papers, including “A Hierarchy of Relaxations Leading to the Convex Hull Representation for General Discrete Optimization Problems”, describing the Reformulation-Linearization Technique (RLT). This work provides a general yet conceptually simple technique, RLT, for helping solve a wide variety of non-convex problems that arise in a variety of production scheduling, location, allocation, distribution, decision making under uncertainty, and engineering design applications. The work is a substantial contribution to the field of optimization, integer programming in particular. Large combinatorial problems that were previously too computationally demanding to solve have now been solved using RLT based methods.