JFPC 2026 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Events

Marion Technical Writer April 20, 2026

Hexaly is delighted to be the Premier sponsor of JFPC 2026, the 21st Francophone Conference on Constraint Programming 2026. The event will take place from May 18 to 20, 2026, at the Université Catholique, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. You can access the conference program here.

Come visit the Hexaly booth and meet two of our Senior Optimization Scientists, Léa Blaise, Ph.D., and Philippe Laborie, Ph.D., 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.

Hexaly, a hybrid optimization solver, by Léa Blaise, Ph.D

Hexaly Optimizer is a new kind of global optimization solver. Its modeling interface is nonlinear and set-oriented. In a sense, Hexaly APIs unify and extend modeling concepts from mixed-linear programming, nonlinear programming, constraint programming, and black-box optimization. Under the hood, Hexaly combines various exact and heuristic optimization methods, such as branch-and-bound, automatic Dantzig-Wolfe reformulation, column and row generation, propagation methods, local search, direct search, and surrogate modeling techniques.

Regarding performance benchmarks, Hexaly distinguishes itself against the leading solvers in the market, like Gurobi, IBM Cplex, and Google OR Tools, by delivering fast and scalable solutions to Routing, Scheduling, Packing, Clustering, and Location problems.

This talk will introduce our set-based modeling formalism and show its scalability for large instances. We will then explore how the solver can use this formalism to automatically use state-of-the-art resolution techniques from the exact and heuristic fields.

Mathematical Solvers for Scheduling Problems (There Is Life Beyond CP and MILP), by Philippe Laborie, Ph.D

Recent years have seen the development of mathematical solvers using richer modeling concepts (intervals, sets, etc.) than those traditionally encountered in MILP or even CP, particularly for scheduling problems. These solvers are now widely used in industry, often achieve performance comparable to the best dedicated algorithms, enable compact modeling, scale well (in terms of problem size and complexity), and are constantly improving. We will present their main characteristics and illustrate them, among others, with Hexaly Optimizer.

We look forward to connecting with the Belgian Operations Research community at the 2026 JFPC conference in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

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