Michael C. Ferris

Professor of Computer Sciences and Industrial Engineering and member of the Center for the Mathematical Sciences

Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin
1210 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53706-1685

telephone: (608) 262-1204
fax: (608) 262-9777
email: ferris@cs.wisc.edu
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ferris/
Ph.D., University of Cambridge, 1989
Interests: Large scale optimization: theory, algorithms, environments and applications

Research Summary

The major thrust of my research is in providing tools to operations researchers, economists and engineers that help them to understand and solve their models. Problem analysis routines, data manipulations and solution visualization procedures are being developed to aid both solver routines and model developers. I am developing software that converts nonlinear programs into complementarity problems without human interaction, using automatic differentiation techniques. Current work is investigating how to easily formulate and solve practical optimization problems using the Condor system over a confederation of workstations.

I am interested in using optimization in applications ranging from video-on-demand to radiation therapy. I also continue to investigate robust methods for solving large-scale variational inequality and nonlinear programming problems with applications to problems in economics and engineering.

Algorithmic work related to complementarity solvers is attempting to solve large scale models in a robust and numerically stable fashion. To this end, we continue to develop new algorithms and implementations, along with testing beds and techniques for succinctly modeling both complementarity problems and mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints.

Sample Recent Publications

Optimizing the delivery of radiation to cancer patients (with D. Shepard, G. Olivera, and T. Mackie), Mathematical Programming Technical Report 98-07, Computer Sciences Department, 1998.

Expressing complementarity problems and communicating them to solvers (with R. Fourer and D. Gay), to appear in SIAM J. on Optimization.

Feasible descent algorithms for mixed complementarity problems (with C. Kanzow and T. Munson), to appear in Mathematical Programming.

This page was automatically created December 30, 1998.
Email pubs@cs.wisc.edu to report errors.