Optimization of Real Asset Portfolio using a Coherent Risk Measure: Application to Oil and Energy Industries

In many industries, investment is part of the most important planning decisions. In past decades, mathematical programming models have been widely used in capacity planning and facility location to support investment decisions. Such initial techniques evolved to the use of enterprise portfolio management, very common in the energy industry. Increasing concern on risk made of … Read more

Incremental-like Bundle Methods with Application to Energy Planning

An important field of application of non-smooth optimization refers to decomposition of large-scale or complex problems by Lagrangian duality. In this setting, the dual problem consists in maximizing a concave non-smooth function that is defined as the sum of sub-functions. The evaluation of each sub-function requires solving a specific optimization sub-problem, with specific computational complexity. … Read more

Consideration of Gas Supply Contracts with Take-or-pay Clauses in the Brazilian Long-term Energy Planning

In Brazil’s long-term energy planning, the dispatch of thermal plants usually varies along a year. Such variation is essentially due to the predominance of the hydraulic mix in the system electric energy supply. For this reason, without preventive measures, a highly irregular cash flow occurs for natural gas (NG) providers, who supply gas for electric … Read more

Convex Relaxations of Non-Convex Mixed Integer Quadratically Constrained Programs: Projected Formulations

A common way to produce a convex relaxation of a Mixed Integer Quadratically Constrained Program (MIQCP) is to lift the problem into a higher dimensional space by introducing variables $Y_{ij}$ to represent each of the products $x_i x_j$ of variables appearing in a quadratic form. One advantage of such extended relaxations is that they can … Read more

Proximal-like contraction methods for monotone variational inequalities in a unified framework

Approximate proximal point algorithms (abbreviated as APPAs) are classical approaches for convex optimization problems and monotone variational inequalities. To solve the subproblems of these algorithms, the projection method takes the iteration in form of $u^{k+1} = P_{\Omega}[u^k-\alpha_k d^k]$. Interestingly, many of them can be paired such that $%\exists \tilde{u}^k, \tilde{u}^k = P_{\Omega}[u^k – \beta_kF(v^k)] = … Read more

Minimizing the sum of weighted completion times in a concurrent open shop

We study minimizing the sum of weighted completion times in a concurrent open shop. We give a primal-dual 2-approximation algorithm for this problem. We also show that several natural linear programming relaxations for this problem have an integrality gap of 2. Finally, we show that this problem is inapproximable within a factor strictly less than … Read more

Efficient high-precision dense matrix algebra on parallel architectures for nonlinear discrete optimization

We provide a proof point for the idea that matrix-based algorithms for discrete optimization problems, mainly conceived for proving theoretical efficiency, can be easily and efficiently implemented on massively-parallel architectures by exploiting scalable and efficient parallel implementations of algorithms for ultra high-precision dense linear algebra. We have successfully implemented our algorithm on the Blue Gene/L … Read more

A full-Newton step infeasible interior-point algorithm for linear programming based on a kernel function

This paper proposes an infeasible interior-point algorithm with full-Newton step for linear programming, which is an extension of the work of Roos (SIAM J. Optim., 16(4):1110–1136, 2006). We introduce a kernel function in the algorithm. For $p\in[0,1)$, the polynomial complexity can be proved and the result coincides with the best result for infeasible interior-point methods, … Read more

A Linear Storage-Retrieval Policy for Robust Warehouse Management

Assigning products to and retrieving them from proper storage locations in a unit-load warehouse are crucial in minimizing its operating cost. The problem becomes intractable when the warehouse faces uncertain demand in a dynamic setting. We assume a factor-based demand model in which demand for each product in each period is affinely dependent on some … Read more