Locating a semi-obnoxious facility with repelling polygonal regions

In this work, a semi-obnoxious facility must be located in the Euclidean plane to give service to a group of customers. Simultaneously, a set of populated areas, with shapes approximated via polygons, must be protected from the negative effects derived from that facility. The problem is formulated as a margin maximization model, following a strategy … Read more

A Coordinate Gradient Descent Method for Nonsmooth Separable Minimization

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of a smooth function and a separable convex function. This problem includes as special cases bound-constrained optimization and smooth optimization with l_1-regularization. We propose a (block) coordinate gradient descent method for solving this class of nonsmooth separable problems. We establish global convergence and, under a local Lipschitzian … Read more

Gap, cosum, and product properties of the $\theta’$ bound on the clique number

In a paper published 1978, McEliece, Rodemich and Rumsey improved Lov\’asz’ bound for the Maximum Clique Problem. This strengthening has become well-known under the name Lov\’asz-Schrijver bound and is usually denoted by $\theta’$. This article now deals with situations where this bound is not exact. To provide instances for which the gap between this bound … Read more

A Computational Study of Exact Knapsack Separation for the Generalized Assignment Problem

The Generalized Assignment Problem is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem which consists of minimizing the assignment costs a set of jobs to a set of machines satisfying capacity constraints. Most of the existing algorithms are based on Branch-and-Price, with lower bounds computed by Dantzig-Wolfe reformulation and column generation. In this paper we propose a … Read more

A recursive trust-region method in infinity norm for bound-constrained nonlinear optimization

A recursive trust-region method is introduced for the solution of bound-constrained nonlinear nonconvex optimization problems for which a hierarchy of descriptions exists. Typical cases are infinite-dimensional problems for which the levels of the hierarchy correspond to discretization levels, from coarse to fine. The new method uses the infinity norm to define the shape of the … Read more

A Robust Branch-Cut-and-Price Algorithm for the Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem

This paper presents a robust branch-cut-and-price algorithm for the Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem (HFVRP), vehicles may have various capacities and fixed costs. The columns in the formulation are associated to $q$-routes, a relaxation of capacitated elementary routes that makes the pricing problem solvable in pseudo-polynomial time. Powerful new families of cuts are also proposed, … Read more

Nonlinear programming without a penalty function or a filter

A new method is introduced for solving equality constrained nonlinear optimization problems. This method does not use a penalty function, nor a barrier or a filter, and yet can be proved to be globally convergent to first-order stationary points. It uses different trust-regions to cope with the nonlinearities of the objective function and the constraints, … Read more

Monotonicity of L”{o}wner Operators and Its Applications to Symmetric Cone Complementarity Problems

This paper focuses on monotone L\”{o}wner operators in Euclidean Jordan algebras and their applications to the symmetric cone complementarity problem (SCCP). We prove necessary and sufficient conditions for locally Lipschitz L\”{o}wner operators to be monotone, strictly monotone and strongly monotone. We also study the relationship between monotonicity and operator-monotonicity of L\”{o}wner operators. As a by-product … Read more

Maximum Utility Product Pricing Models and Algorithms Based on Reservation Prices

We consider a revenue management model for pricing a product line with several customer segments under the assumption that customers’ product choices are determined entirely by their reservation prices. We highlight key mathematical properties of the maximum utility model and formulate it as a mixed-integer programming problem, design heuristics and valid cuts. We further present … Read more