Ahmad Heidari, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering and Kummer Innovation and Entrepreneurship Doctoral Fellow, earned third place in the 2025 GAMSPy Student Competition. This was an international contest hosted by General Algebraic Modeling System (GAMS) Development Corporation to highlight innovative optimization modeling projects using GAMSPy.

Heidari is advised by Dr. Rui Bo, and his winning project applied Benders decomposition to a large-scale unit commitment (UC) problem, a classical challenge in power system operations. His model demonstrated a complete optimization workflow — from mathematical reformulation and decomposition of a mixed-integer linear program to subproblem generation, iterative constraint integration, and convergence analysis.

The competition ran throughout the 2024–2025 academic year, with winners announced May 15, 2025. Entries were judged on originality, technical execution, data integration, visualization and clarity. Heidari’s project was recognized for its technical depth, practical relevance to energy systems and clean implementation in Python using GAMSPy.