IFORS 2026 Vienna, Austria

Events

Marion Technical Writer June 1, 2026

Hexaly is delighted to be the Headline Sponsor of IFORS 2026 Vienna, the 24th Conference of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies, taking place from July 12 to 17, 2026, at the University of Vienna, Austria. You can access the conference program here.

Come visit the Hexaly booth at IFORS 2026 Vienna and meet our team throughout the conference. We will be happy to connect if you have questions, want to learn more about our next-generation optimization technology, or are curious about the latest features introduced in Hexaly 14.5. This new release delivers major performance improvements in routing, scheduling, and packing, as well as significant advances in nonlinear optimization.

IFORS 2026 Vienna is also a great opportunity to:

• Discuss real-world optimization challenges
• Discover how leading companies use Hexaly
• Explore career opportunities within our team in an informal setting

Below are the abstracts of Hexaly’s talks at IFORS 2026 Vienna.

Hexaly Workshop: modeling and solving packing problems with Hexaly Studio
Léa Blaise, Ph.D., Senior Optimization Scientist, Hexaly
Wednesday, July 15, 8:30-10:00 AM, Room JUR – Dachgeschoss

Hexaly Optimizer is a next-generation Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) solver that combines exact and heuristic techniques to solve complex optimization problems. At its core is an innovative modeling formalism based on nonlinear and set-oriented expressions, enabling users to write compact, expressive models for a wide variety of optimization problems. This formalism not only simplifies the modeling process but also provides the solver with higher-level structural information, enabling it to leverage advanced algorithmic techniques from the literature to achieve state-of-the-art performance across classic optimization domains such as routing, scheduling, and packing.

In this hands-on workshop, we will focus on applying Hexaly to packing problems, showcasing how the solver’s set-based modeling capabilities naturally align with the structure of these problems. Participants will be guided through building and solving real-world packing problems using Hexaly Studio, a web-based integrated development environment designed specifically for optimization modeling. Hexaly Studio features intuitive dashboards, interactive widgets, and graphical visualizations of solutions, making it easy to both formulate models and interpret results. Through guided examples and interactive problem-solving, participants will gain hands-on experience with Hexaly and will be equipped to explore it further in their own research or applied projects.

Hexaly Assistant: LLM-driven modeling for Hexaly
Fred Gardi, Co-Founder & CEO, Hexaly

Large language models (LLMs) enable the generation of optimization models from natural language. Prior work focuses on linear integer programs (NL4OPT benchmark), but Hexaly uses a non-linear set-based formalism well-suited to compactly model combinatorial problems such as vehicle routing, scheduling, and packing. We assess the capabilities of foundational LLMs in this context and show how results can be improved via prompt engineering and automatic syntax validation and correction in a closed-loop process integrated in Hexaly Studio.

Solving nonlinear continuous optimization problems with Hexaly
Julien Darlay, Co-Founder & Head of Science, Hexaly

Hexaly is a model-and-run global optimization solver. In this talk, we present the heuristic and exact components used to address continuous nonlinear problems. Constraints and objectives are represented using an expression graph. Hexaly 14.5 introduces new components to improve the resolution of such problems, including structure detection, a new modular interior-point algorithm, and a branch-and-reduce algorithm with cut generation. This new version has been benchmarked against open-source implementations on three benchmarks: pooling, portfolio optimization, and the CUTEst library.

Branch-cut-price methods for routing problems in Hexaly
Noémie Cartier, Ph.D., Optimization Scientist, Hexaly

Hexaly is a model-and-run mathematical optimization solver that uses both exact and heuristic techniques. Its modeling formalism includes list variables that can be used, for example, to model routes in routing problems in a compact, well-suited form for heuristic search. This talk will focus on how Hexaly automatically reformulates such structures and uses branch-cut-price techniques to generate lower bounds on a wide variety of routing problems. We will present the mathematical tools used and benchmarks for classical routing problem families.

We look forward to connecting with the worldwide Operations Research community at the 2026 IFORS conference in Vienna, Austria.

Feel free to explore our upcoming conferences, events, and webinars.