Jong-Shi Pang, Epstein Family Chair and professor of industrial and systems engineering. Photo/Annie Chen
A new project in the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering will examine solutions to a new class of challenging optimization problems, with the support of the Air Force Office of Sponsored Research.
Epstein Family Chair and Distinguished Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering Jong-Shi Pang will lead the project to examine a solution to a series of optimization problems harnessing progressive integer programming. The project will examine Heaviside composite optimization problems, complementarity constraints, and conditional stochastic programs.
Pang said that Heaviside functions have broad applications in the modeling of a vast range of problems, yet this area had been minimally studied in the field of optimization. Pang and his team have previously been supported by AFOSR in this work. They are now proposing several new directions in the next research phase, looking at how progressive integer programming can be harnessed to address these problems.
Pang is a leading expert in operations research and optimization in systems with multiple competing players. He specializes in mathematical and algorithmic theories for constrained multi-agent systems with applications in communication, power, economics, and transportation systems. His research has garnered over 40,000 citations and millions of dollars in funding.
Pang joined USC Viterbi’s Epstein Department in 2013. Pang earned his PhD in operations research from Stanford University. Prior to joining USC, he was the first head of the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, after 30 years of academic work at the Johns Hopkins University and other universities.
Over the course of his career, Pang has received an impressive number of accolades, including the 2003 George B. Dantzig Prize, awarded jointly by the Mathematical Programming Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), as well as the Lanchester Prize, also presented by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
Pang also received the 2019 INFORMS John von Neumann Theory Prize, honoring his lifetime achievements in operations research. In 2021, Pang was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, whose membership is one of the highest honors accorded to engineers.
In 2023, Pang was honored with a University of Southern California Distinguished Professorship — the university’s highest honor.
Published on December 3rd, 2024
Last updated on December 3rd, 2024
