Logic-Based Benders Decomposition

John Hooker is Professor of Operations Research and T. Jerome Holleran Professor of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility at Carnegie Mellon University. He has published 200+ articles, 9 books, and 6 edited volumes in operations research, constraint programming, AI, formal logic, business ethics, ethics of AI, cross-cultural management, philosophy, and music theory. He is a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) as well as recipient of the INFORMS Computing Society Prize and the INFORMS Khachiyan Prize for lifetime achievements in optimization. He is equally active in the constraint programming community, where he has chaired conferences and workshops, served on the Executive Committee of the Association for Constraint Programming (ACP), and was recognized with the ACP Research Excellence Award.

Dr. Hooker is a pioneer in the integration of optimization and constraint programming technologies, having written the first book and co-chaired the first conference on the subject. OR/CP integration now an important element of state-of-the-art optimization software. He also introduced logic-based Benders decomposition for optimization, which substantially generalizes the classical Benders method. It can reduce solution times by orders of magnitude and allows decomposition to be applied to a much wider variety of optimization problems. He was the first to observe the phase transition phenomenon in satisfiability problems. He and T. Hadzic introduced decision diagrams as an optimization method, and several investigators are now pursuing this line of research. In recent research, he draws on his dual background in ethics and operations research to develop optimization models for fairness and distributive justice.