Er Raqabi El Mehdi

Er Raqabi El Mehdi

Research is my Vision. Kaizen is my Mission. Sharing is my Value.

Hi, I am Mehdi. I hold a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Polytechnique Montreal. So far, I have been learning and evolving in Six Countries on Five Continents.

United States The Land of The Uncle Sam (<1 Year). In 2025, I started my Postdoc at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering of Georgia Institute of Technology (GaTech) and the NSF AI Research Institute for Advances in Optimization (AI4OPT), mentored by Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck.

Canada The Land of The Maple Leaf (>5 Years). I obtained my Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Mathematics and Industrial Engineering Department of Polytechnique Montreal (Poly) and the Groupe d’Études et de Recherche en Analyse des Décisions (Gerad), advised by Professors El Hallaoui Issmaïl & Soumis François. I have specialized in large-scale optimization from several perspectives: solver (commercial, open-source, etc.), metaheuristics (local search, simulated annealing, etc.), exact (decompositions, branch-and-price, etc.), and learning (supervised, unsupervised, etc.). My Research was generously supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Nature et Technologie (FRQNT), the Institut de Valorisation des Données (IVADO), and the OCP Group.

Belgium The Land of The Battlefields (<1 Year). During 2024, I was a Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Economics and Business of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), advised by Professor Roel Leus. I worked on a primal variant of Benders decomposition for large-scale stochastic contexts.

Australia The Land of The Hopping Kangaroos (<1 Year). During 2023, I was a Visiting Scholar at the Business School of Griffith University (Griff), advised by Professor Yong Wu. I explored the intersection of Re-optimization (Operations Research) and Resilience (Management Science) for perturbed large-scale contexts such as supply chains.

Japan The Land of The Rising Sun (~2 Years). Prior to Poly, I obtained an MBA from the International University of Japan (IUJ), where I worked with Professor Li Wenkai on designing an electric vehicle migration framework. I was fortunate to obtain a specialization in finance, leveraging my engineering and business backgrounds. My MBA was generously supported by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

Morocco The Kingdom of The Western Place (>20 Years). I also hold a master’s degree in industrial engineering from Ecole Mohammadia d’Ingénieurs (EMI).

My Curriculum Vitae can be found here.

News

  • 24/04/2025: My Thesis was awarded the GERAD 2024 Best Thesis Competition at GERAD.
  • 07/03/2025: My Thesis was awarded the MAGI 2024 Best Thesis Prize at Polytechnique Montreal.
  • 01/02/2025: I started my Postdoc at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
  • 22/01/2025: Paper “OCP Optimizes Its Supply Chain for Africa” was accepted to Journal INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics.
  • 20/12/2024: I earned my Ph.D. today. The jury has recommended the thesis for the Best Thesis Prize at Polytechnique Montreal.
  • 13/12/2024: Doctoral Thesis Defense Announcement.
  • 11/10/2024: Paper “Towards Resilience: Primal Large-scale Re-optimization” was accepted to Journal Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review.
  • 03/07/2024: Research Project “OCP Optimizes Its Supply Chain for Africa and The World” has been selected as a Winner at the EURO Excellence in Practice Award 2024.
  • 18/03/2024: Research Project “OCP Optimizes Its Supply Chain for Africa and The World” has been selected as a Finalist at the EURO Excellence in Practice Award 2024.
  • 08/02/2023: Talk “An Efficient Decomposition Matheuristic for the Unit Commitment Problem with Power Stability Constraints” at ORBEL38.
  • 05/02/2023: Visiting Scholar at KU Leuven, Belgium.
  • 08/12/2023: Talk “An Electric Vehicle Transitioning Framework for Public Fleet Planning” at International University of Japan.
  • 06/12/2023: Seminar “Meet a GERAD Researcher!”.
  • 09/11/2023: Industrial Engineering Seminar at Mohammadia School of Engineering.
  • 20/07/2023: Member within the IVADO Intersectorial Student Committee.
  • 30/06/2023: Paper “MPILS: An Automatic Tuner for MILP Solvers” was accepted to Journal Computers & Operations Research.
  • 20/06/2023: Internship at the Hydro-Québec Research Institute (IREQ).

Blogs

Six Countries Five Continents