André L. Tits (andre@umd.edu)

Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research

André L. Tits was born in Verviers, Belgium on April 13, 1951. He received the `Ingénieur Civil' degree from the University of Liège, Belgium and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, all in Electrical Engineering, in 1974, 1979, and 1980, respectively.

Since 1981, Dr. Tits has been with the University of Maryland, College Park. Currently, he is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and he holds a permanent joint appointment with the Institute for Systems Research. He has held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley, at the Lund Institute of Technology, at INRIA, at the Catholic University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium and at the Australian National University.

Dr. Tits received a 1985 NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of the Mathematical Programming Society and of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

From July 1998 to April 2005, Dr. Tits was the Editor for Technical Notes and Correspondence of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. As of September 2005, he is the Editor for Rapid Publications of Automatica. He is also an associate editor of Operations Research, of Computational Optimization and Applications, and of Optimization and Engineering.

Research Interests

Dr. Tits' main research interests lie in various aspects of numerical optimization, optimization-based system design and robust control with emphasis on numerical methods. In addition to carrying out fundamental research work in these areas, researchers in Dr. Tits' group have developed several software packages. Especially popular is FSQP, a tandem of sophisticated software suites for nonlinear constrainted optimization, in use at over 1000 sites around the world.

Selected Reports and Publications

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Optimization

1. J. L. Zhou and A. L. Tits, An SQP Algorithm for Finely Discretized Continuous Minimax Problems and Other Minimax Problems With Many Objective Functions, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1996, pp. 461--487. PDF file. Also see Erratum, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1998: PDF file
2. C. T. Lawrence and A. L. Tits, Feasible Sequential Quadratic Programming for Finely Discretized Problems from SIP, In R. Reemtsen, J.-J. Ruckmann (eds.): Semi-Infinite Programming, in the series Nonconvex Optimization and its Applications. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998, pp. 159--193. PDF file. Also see Erratum: PDF file
3. C.T. Lawrence and A.L. Tits, A Computationally Efficient Feasible Sequential Quadratic Programming Algorithm, SIAM J. Optimization, Vol. 11, No. 4, 2001, pp. 1092-1118. PDF file.
4. A.L. Tits, A. Waechter, S. Bakhtiari, T.J. Urban and C.T. Lawrence, A Primal-Dual Interior-Point Method for Nonlinear Programming with Strong Global and Local Convergence Properties, SIAM J. Optimization, Vol.~14, No.~1, pp.~173--199, 2003. PDF file.
5. S. Bakhtiari and A.L. Tits, A Simple Primal-Dual Feasible Interior-Point Method for Nonlinear Programming with Monotone Descent, Computational Optimization and Applications, Vol. 25, pp. 17--38, 2003. PDF file
6. A.L. Tits, P.A. Absil and W.P. Woessner, Constraint Reduction for Linear Programs with Many Inequality Constraints, SIAM J. Optimization, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 119-146, 2006. PDF file.
7. S. Schurr, A.L. Tits and D. O'Leary, Universal Duality in Conic Convex Optimization, Mathematical Programming, Series A, Vol. 109, No. 1, pp. 69--88, 2007. PDF file.
8. P.A. Absil and A.L. Tits, Newton-KKT Interior-Point Methods for Indefinite Quadratic Programming, Computational Optimization and Applications, Vol. 36, pp. 5--41, 2007. PDF file.
9. C.D. Hauck, C.D. Levermore and A.L. Tits, Convex Duality and Entropy-Based Moment Closures: Characterizing Degenerate Densities, SIAM J. Control Optim., Vol.~47, No.~4, pp.~1977--2015, 2008. PDF file.
10. L.B. Winternitz, S.O. Nicholls, A.L. Tits and D.P. O'Leary, A Constraint-Reduced Variant of Mehrotra's Predictor-Corrector Algorithm, submitted for publication, January 2010. PDF file.
11. J.H. Jung, D.P. O'Leary, and A.L. Tits, Adaptive Constraint Reduction for Training Support Vector Machines, to appear in Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis, 2009. PDF file.
12. J.H. Jung, D.P. O'Leary, and A.L. Tits, Adaptive Constraint Reduction for Convex Quadratic Programming, to appear in Computational Optimization and Applications, 2010. PDF file.
13. S.P. Schurr D.P. O'Leary, and A.L. Tits, A polynomial-time interior-point method for conic optimization, with inexact barrier evaluations, SIAM J. Optimization, Vol.~20, No.~1, pp.~548--571, 2009. PDF file.

Control Theory

1. A.L. Tits, V. Balakrishnan and L. Lee, Robustness under Bounded Uncertainty with Phase Information, IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, vol. 44, no. 1, 1999. PDF file
2. A.L. Tits and V. Balakrishnan, Small-mu Theorems with Frequency-Dependent Uncertainty Bounds, Math. of Control, Signals and Sytems, vol. 11, pp. 220--243, 1998. PDf file
3. Y.S. Chou, A.L. Tits and V. Balakrishnan, Absolute Stability Theory, $\mu$ Theory, and State-Space Verification of Frequency-Domain Conditions: Connections and Implications for Computation, IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, vol. 44, No. 5, May 1999, pp. 906--913. PDF file
4. C.T. Lawrence, A.L. Tits and P. Van Dooren, A Fast Algorithm for the Computation of an Upper Bound on the Mu-Norm, Automatica, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2000, pp. 449--456. PDF file
5. A.A. Kale and A.L. Tits, On Kharitonov's Theorem Without Invariant Degree Assumption, Automatica, vol. 36, No. 7, 2000, pp. 1075--1076. PDF file
6. A.L. Tits and Y.-S. Chou, On Mixed-Mu Synthesis, Automatica, vol. 36, No. 7, 2000, pp. 1077--1079. PDF file
7. V. Sima, A.L. Tits, and Y. Yang, Computational experience with robust pole assignment algorithms, Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Control Applications (CCA), 2006 IEEE Conference on Computer-Aided Control Systems Design (CACSD) 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control (ISIC), Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany, October 4--6, 2006, pp.36--41, Omnipress. PDF file

Curriculum Vitae. PDF file

Last updated November 6, 2004