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Wolfgang Konen talking about SACOBRA at MOPTA2025

The MOPTA conference (Modeling and Optimization: Theory and Applications, https://coral.ise.lehigh.edu/mopta2025/) has been around for many years, since 2001 to be precise. It usually takes place in America, but this year, 2025, European and American scientists met in the middle, so to speak, because it took place in the Azores in June this year.

In June 2025, optimization scientists from all over the world met on Sao Miguel, the main island of the Azores, to exchange scientific ideas. The research conducted at the Gummersbach campus attracted attention in this international circle, as Wolfgang Konen was invited by Don Jones, one of the co-organizers of the conference, to speak as an invited speaker about his research area of Constrained Optimization. This is a special honor, because normally one has to undergo a more or less extensive review process.

Constrained optimization means that you not only want to minimize a target value (e.g. fuel consumption of a car), but also have to comply with one or more constraints (e.g. safety requirements for the structural integrity of the car). A while ago, Wolfgang Konen, together with Samineh Bagheri (former PhD student at TH Köln) and with Prof. Thomas Bäck from Leiden University, developed the R package SACOBRA for constrained optimization, which is still one of the leading software packages in this field. A port of the R software to Python was carried out in 2025 just before June and it was successfully announced at the conference. It is now available for download from GitHub: https://github.com/WolfgangKonen/SACOBRA_Py.

The consistently mild climate produces trees with gigantic roots, nearly as large as Wolfgang Konen

The MOPTA conference in the Azores offered also many opportunities for networking. Last but not least, the beautiful landscape of the Azores, was especially inviting.