Helena Ramalhinho Lourenço

Helena Ramalhinho Lourenço

Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Barcelona, Spain

Professor

Bio

Helena Ramalhinho Lourenço is Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and BSE Affiliated Professor, with a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University, New York, USA. She has been cited by over 6,000 researchers and is currently the director of the Business Analytics Research Group.

Her research focuses on Operations Research, Scheduling, Combinatorial Optimization, Metaheuristics, and particularly Iterated Local Search methodology. She is a leading expert in Iterated Local Search (ILS) and co-authored the seminal work “Iterated Local Search: Framework and Applications” published in the Handbook of Metaheuristics.

Research Focus

Iterated Local Search: Helena is a world-leading expert in Iterated Local Search (ILS), a conceptually simple and efficient metaheuristic. She co-authored the foundational work on ILS methodology, which has been applied to many different optimization problems with over 9,000 entries in Google Scholar.

Applications: Her current research interests include real Vehicle Routing problems for Retailing, Logistics and Transport, Scheduling problems, and Cliques for Marketing Analysis. She works on extensions of ILS combined with Simulation, Randomization and Exact Methods.

SimILS: Her recent work includes SimILS: A Simulation-based extension of the Iterated Local Search metaheuristic for Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization, applied to solve the In-house Logistics Routing Problem (ILRP).

Education

  • Ph.D. in Operations Research - Cornell University, New York, USA

Leadership

  • Director - Business Analytics Research Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
  • BSE Affiliated Professor - Barcelona School of Economics

Key Publications

  • “Iterated Local Search: Framework and Applications” - Handbook of Metaheuristics (2019)
  • Extensive work on SimILS and stochastic optimization
  • Over 6,000 citations in operations research and optimization

Interests

Operations Research | Metaheuristics | Iterated Local Search | Job-Shop Scheduling | Vehicle Routing | Supply Chain Management