The paper titled “Faster exact solution of sparse MaxCut and QUBO problems” (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12532-023-00236-6) by Daniel Rehfeldt, Thorsten Koch, and Yuji Shinano has won the Outstanding Paper of the Year Award 2023 in Mathematical Programming Computation. The award was announced at the 2024 ISMP in Montreal, Canada.
This research, a collaboration between the SynLab of the Research Campus MODAL, Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB), and i2damo GmbH, introduces the QuBowl solver. This tool marks a significant advancement in solving the maximum-cut (MaxCut) problem and the equivalent quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem using cutting-edge mathematical programming techniques.
The QuBowl solver has demonstrated superior performance, notably in the most recent Nonconvex QUBO-QPLIB Benchmark by Professor Hans Mittelmann of Arizona State University, where it solved 15 out of 23 QUBO problems to global optimality, outperforming other competitors (https://plato.asu.edu/ftp/qubo.html).