Organised by Julian Hall and Ivet Galabova, the second HiGHS Workshop took place on 26-27 June 2025 at the Informatics Forum. Of the 47 attendees, there were 16 representatives from 14 companies that use or distribute HiGHS, including Microsoft and Edinburgh Airport, and smaller companies, some of which are major players in the optimization modelling and software industry. Also attending were three academics from Imperial College London, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, and Ahmedabad University, and 14 students from the Universities of Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Antwerpen, Bordeaux, Leuven, Linköping, and Strathclyde, as well as the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits.

The workshop began with Julian giving a review of HiGHS over the past 12 months, during which time the team has grown from three to six, and an outlook for the next year.  Filippo Zanetti reported on the new interior point solver he has developed for HiGHS, and new mixed-integer programming developer Mark Turner gave an insight into this most important solver in HiGHS.

The 14 talks that followed covered a range of topics, from technical optimization, through modelling languages using HiGHS, and OR applications in industry. In particular there was a popular talk by Renzo Wijngaarden from Edinburgh Airport, who discussed two great applications of OR: the security line management problem (which is now solved using HiGHS) and the stand allocation problem.

Writing solvers for the animal feed formulation problem, as modelled and solved by Format International (now part of Datacor), has been very important in the history of HiGHS, and Andrew McGee of Datacor brought their OR and optimization challenges to a wider audience in a talk about pet food production. Scotts Kitchen hosted the workshop dinner on 26 June and, after the workshop finished, there was an informal wind-down back at the Pear Tree.

This year the emphasis of the workshop was rather more on the technical aspects of solvers, and it was great to bring together experts from around the world, fostering relationships that will be very valuable to HiGHS going forward. Next year the HiGHS Workshop will run together with JuMP-Dev on 1 June, before the SIAM Optimization (2-5 June) in Edinburgh.

The second HiGHS Workshop / School of Mathematics by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0

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