About The Optimization Firm

Founded in 2001, The Optimization Firm was created to commercialize optimization software developed by Professor Nick Sahinidis during his time at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while managing the Sahinidis lab. The firm's flagship product, BARON 5, made its first appearance in 2001 when it was released under GAMS. BARON has since become the world’s leading global optimization solver, used across industries including energy, manufacturing, and healthcare. ALAMO, another key product, uses innovative optimization and sampling technology to build interpretable machine learning models from data.

Our Products

BARON: A complete solver for global optimization problems (LP, NLP, MIP, and MINLP). It is used by over 800 institutions in more than 60 countries and is recognized as the world’s best tool for global optimization.

ALAMO: A tool that builds interpretable machine learning models using optimization and sampling, widely used by engineers, managers, and data scientists.

Our Team

BARON was initially developed at the University of Illinois and Carnegie Mellon University and is currently based in Atlanta, GA, where Professor Sahinidis now serves on the faculty at Georgia Tech. The team behind BARON includes experts like Hong Ryoo, Joseph Shectman, Mohit Tawarmalani, Vinay Ghildyal, Xiaowei Bao, Aida Khajavirad, Keith Zorn, Yash Puranik, Mustafa Kılınç, and Carlos Nohra, all of whom have contributed significantly to its development.

Where Are We Now?

The Optimization Firm is located in Atlanta, GA, and continues to be led by Professor Nick Sahinidis at Georgia Tech.

For more details, visit our Company Brochure, BARON Publications page, and BARON Notices page.