JANUARY 2024

HiGHS Newsletter 24.0

Welcome to the first HiGHS newsletter
We intend to publish two or three per year. This edition announces the first HiGHS workshop, and the new interior
point solver development. For future issues we invite users
to submit a brief introduction to how they are using HiGHS,
possibly linked to a longer article.

HiGHS workshop
The first HiGHS workshop
will take place in Edinburgh
on 27 and 28 June 2024:
the end of the week before the EURO Operational Research conference in Copenhagen. With major industrial
and academic users of HiGHS
already committed to attending, this will be an opportunity to make connections withother HiGHS users and help
shape the project’s future. We
are already looking forward towelcoming users to Edinburgh.
For full details and registration,
see workshop24.highs.dev.

Development
Having been identified as
critical to developing fully
open energy systems modelling, a crowdfunding campaign in 2022 yielded a donation of $420k to develop

a new interior point solver
for HiGHS. This will solve
convex QP problems as wellas LPs. In the summer of2023, Filippo Zanetti wrote
a prototype solver for LP
as a workbench for developing algorithmic techniques
and the necessary numericallinear algebra. Simultaneously,
Yanyu Zhou worked with Julian as an MSc intern, assessing the performance of existing open-source solvers forboth the positive definite Newton system, and the quasidefinite augmented system. Experience was also gained in theuse of the Shermann-MorrisonWoodbury formula for handling LPs for which the constraint matrix contains small
numbers of dense columns.
Jacek Gondzio is bringing hisdecades of IPM experience tothe team.

HiGHS Newsletter 24.0
 www.highs.dev # highsopt@gmail.com

ï@highs-opt

HiGHS on tour!

The HiGHS team was busy inthe autumn, with Julian andIvet meeting users at the German OR conference and INFORMS, where they picked up
valuable advice on developing the interior point solver.
Together with Yanyu, they attended the JuMP Optimization workshop in Paris. Julianalso went to Ecuador, wherehe taught a course on linear optimization at ESPOL in
Guayaquil, and delivered thefirst ever practical workshop
using HiGHS.

§ERGO-Code/HiGHS

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The HiGHS teamJulian Hall

From Macclesfield, England,
Julian Hall has a BA in Mathematics from the University ofOxford, a PhD from the University of Dundee supervised
by Roger Fletcher and, since
1990, has been employed asa lecturer by the Universityof Edinburgh. Since 2018 hehas developed HiGHS with Ivet
Galabova, using solvers written by Edinburgh graduate students and a developer.

Ivet Galabova

From Sofia, Bulgaria, Ivet Galabova has a BSc in Computer Science, an MSc in Operational Research and Computational Optimization, anda PhD supervised by JulianHall, all from the University ofEdinburgh. Having developed
HiGHS with Julian since its inception during her PhD, since2022 she has been employed
as its Integration and Development Manager.

HiGHS Newsletter 24.0
 www.highs.dev # highsopt@gmail.com

ï@highs-opt

Introducing Filippo

From Pordenone, Italy, Filippo
Zanetti has a Bachelor’s degree
in Aerospace Engineering andMaster’s degree in Mathematical Engineering from the University of Padova and a PhD
supervised by Jacek Gondzio
from the University of Edinburgh. Since January 2024,
Filippo has been employed as
the HiGHS interior point developer.

§ERGO-Code/HiGHS

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