In this presentation we give an overview of the research contributions of Dr Pedro Castro, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Instituto Tecnico de Lisboa, Portugal, who sadly passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 51. He was a well-known and highly respected leading researcher in the areas of Process Systems Engineering and Optimization, where he made major contributions in the areas of scheduling and global optimization. In this presentation, we review his pioneering work in batch scheduling using the Resource Task Network as a major modeling framework, and for which he developed a number of novel continuous time mixed-integer linear programming models. He also was able to derive systematically major scheduling models using Generalized Disjunctive Programming as the modeling framework. Next, we will describe his novel contributions to the global optimization of bilinear programs using a multiparametric disaggregation technique. He successfully applied this technique to crude oil blending operations and to other pooling problems.
I had the privilege of collaborating with Pedro Castro in several research projects since 2004 having produced 25 joint publications with him. He was also involved in a number of very successful collaborations with industry (e.g., ABB, Sasol) through the Center for Advanced Process Decision-making at Carnegie Melon. He was a very productive researcher having produced over 100 journal articles that received over 5,500 Google Scholar citations. He also gave many presentations at major international meetings (e.g. ESCAPE, AIChE, PSE, FOCAPO, INFORMS). I will provide a summary of his brilliant career and of his warm and friendly personality. We have lost a very dear colleague who we all greatly miss. May he rest in peace.
