Raghavan receives Glover-Klingman prize; Olian Award

Congratulations to Associate Professor S. (Raghu) Raghavan (Smith School of Business/ISR) for receiving the Glover-Klingman prize from the journal Networks for the best paper published in the journal in 2005. He co-authored "Strong Formulations for Network Design Problems with Connectivity Requirements" with Thomas Magnanti, Dean of Engineering at MIT; the article appeared in the January 2005 issue.

The certificate citation reads:
“This paper studies the problem of designing a minimum cost network that enforces lower bounds on the number of edge-disjoint paths joining pairs of nodes in the network. Such a problem arises in a variety of important application areas where redundancy is crucial, such as VLSI design and telecommunications network design. This paper combines graph theory insights with excellent modeling ideas in order to provide improved formulations for network design problems, either by reducing their size or by strengthening the quality of the associated linear programming relaxation. For “unitary” problems, in which solutions must be connected networks, the authors derive two classes of valid inequalities (partition inequalities and combinatorial design inequalities) that generalize known classes of valid inequalities for the Steiner tree problem. They also provide a directed model for “nonunitary” problems (such as the Steiner forest problem) and obtain an improved flow formulation for these more general problems. This paper stands out for its unifying perspective and its substantial contributions to understanding the role of flow formulations in the effective solution of an important class of combinatorial optimization problems. Consequently, this work well deserves to be a winner of the Glover-Klingman Prize.”

S. Raghavan also recently received the Robert H. Smith School of Business's Olian Award for his proposal, “Assigning and Pricing Sponsored Online Ad-Sites as a Multi-Unit Auction with Budget Constraints." The award is given annually to the Smith School faculty member who presents the best summer research proposal.

Published August 22, 2006