Harold Benson

Harold Philip Benson (born 1949) is an American operations researcher, mathematician, and professor. He is best known for his work in multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) and for formulating Benson's algorithm in the field of linear programming. He served as an American Economic Institutions professor at the University of Florida. Benson was also a founding member of the multiple-criteria decision making section of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) when it was established in 2010.

He invented what is now called Benson's algorithm, which finds all of the efficient extreme points and the full weakly efficient set in the outcome set of a multiple objective linear program. A computer code called BENSOLVE was developed to execute this algorithm.

Benson also helped to define and explore properly efficient solutions of nonlinear vector optimization problems. In global optimization, he focused a good portion of his work on the theory and solutions for concave minimization problems. During the 1990s, Benson's MCDM work included research on optimization over the efficient set and on generating the complete set of efficient and extreme point efficient solutions in the decision and criterion spaces of multiple objective mathematical programming problems.

Awards and honors In 2004, Benson received the Georg Cantor Award from the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making for his contributions to the theory, methodology, and practices of multiple-criteria decision making.

In the book Multiple Criteria Decision Making: From Early History to the 21st Century, which was published in 2011, Benson was named one of the 42 world-leading researchers in the history of MCDM. In 2018, a special issue of the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications was dedicated to Benson.

Selected publications