Lion20 2026 Milan, Italy
Hexaly is delighted to be the Platinum Sponsor of the LION20 2026 Conference. The 20th Learning and Intelligent Optimization Conference. The event will take place from June 15 to 19, 2026, at Universita degli Studi Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy. You can access the conference program here.
Come visit the Hexaly booth and meet Julien Darlay, Co- Founder & Head Of Science of Hexaly, who will be on-site throughout the day. He will be happy to connect if you have questions, want to learn more about our technology, or are curious about the latest features of Hexaly 14.5. This new version 14.5 brings major performance improvements in routing, scheduling, and packing, along with a significant boost in nonlinear optimization capabilities. It is also a great opportunity to discuss career opportunities at Hexaly in an informal setting. Below is the abstract of Julien’s talk at the 2026 Lion20 Conference:
Hexaly, Hybrid Optimization Solver
Julien Darlay, Co- Founder & Head Of Science of Hexaly
Tuesday, June 16, from 11:30-12:30
Hexaly is a new type of global optimization solver. Its modeling interface, accessible in Python, Java, C#, and C++, is hybrid, unifying concepts from mixed-integer programming, nonlinear programming, constraint programming, and black-box optimization. As a result, it is nonlinear, set-oriented, and supports user-coded functions, enabling seamless integration of simulation with optimization or machine learning with optimization. Under the hood, Hexaly combines exact and heuristic optimization methods: spatial branch-and-bound, simplex methods, interior-point methods, constraint propagation, automatic branch-cut-price, local search, surrogate modeling, among others.
Hexaly stands out from traditional solvers by delivering super-fast solutions to discrete optimization problems such as routing, scheduling, sequencing, packing, picking, clustering, matching, assignment, balancing, and location problems. For example, Hexaly provides solutions close to the best-known results in the literature for vehicle routing problems with thousands of points and job shop scheduling problems with millions of tasks, in just 1 minute of runtime on a basic laptop.
This presentation introduces the set-based modeling formalism and demonstrates its scalability for solving large-scale problems. It further examines how the solver exploits this formalism to automatically orchestrate advanced exact and heuristic methods from the state of the art.
We look forward to connecting with the Italian Operations Research community at the 2026 Lion20 Conference in Kingston,Milan, Italy.
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