Endogenous Price Zones and Investment Incentives in Electricity Markets: An Application of Multilevel Optimization with Graph Partitioning

In the course of the energy transition, load and supply centers are growing apart in electricity markets worldwide, rendering regional price signals even more important to provide adequate locational investment incentives. This paper focuses on electricity markets that operate under a zonal pricing market design. For a fixed number of zones, we endogenously derive the … Read more

Scalable Branching on Dual Decomposition of Stochastic Mixed-Integer Programming Problems

We present a scalable branching method for the dual decomposition of stochastic mixed-integer programming. Our new branching method is based on the branching method proposed by Caro e and Schultz that creates branching disjunctions on first-stage variables only. We propose improvements to the process for creating branching disjunctions, including 1) branching on the optimal solutions … Read more

Dynamic Courier Routing for a Food Delivery Service

Services like Grubhub and UberEats have revolutionized the way that diners can find and order from restaurants. The standard business model for such services, however, allows diners to order from only one restaurant at a time. Inspired by a food delivery service in the southeastern United States, this paper proposes the framework for a more … Read more

Resilient layout, design and operation of energy-efficient water distribution networks for high-rise buildings using MINLP

Water supply of high-rise buildings requires pump systems to ensure pressure requirements. The design goal of these systems are energy and cost efficiency, both in terms of fixed cost as well as during operation. In this paper, cost optimal decentralized and tree-shaped water distribution networks are computed, where placements of pumps at different locations in … Read more

A Subsampling Line-Search Method with Second-Order Results

In many contemporary optimization problems such as those arising in machine learning, it can be computationally challenging or even infeasible to evaluate an entire function or its derivatives. This motivates the use of stochastic algorithms that sample problem data, which can jeopardize the guarantees obtained through classical globalization techniques in optimization such as a trust … Read more

A non-monotone Inexact Restoration approach for minimization with orthogonality constraints

In this work we consider the problem of minimizing a differentiable functional restricted to the set of $n\times p$ matrices with orthonormal columns. This problem appears in several fields such as statistics, signal processing, global positioning system, machine learning, physics, chemistry and others. We present an algorithm based on a recent non-monotone variation of the … Read more

Learning a Mixture of Gaussians via Mixed Integer Optimization

We consider the problem of estimating the parameters of a multivariate Gaussian mixture model (GMM) given access to $n$ samples $\x_1,\x_2,\ldots ,\x_n \in\mathbb{R}^d$ that are believed to have come from a mixture of multiple subpopulations. State-of-the-art algorithms used to recover these parameters use heuristics to either maximize the log-likelihood of the sample or try to … Read more

Non-monotone Inexact Restoration Method for nonlinear programming

This paper deals with a new variant of the Inexact Restoration Method of Fischer and Friedlander (COAP, 46, pp. 333-346, 2010). We propose an algorithm that replaces the monotone line-search performed in the tangent phase (with regard to the penalty function) by a non-monotone one. Con- vergence to feasible points satisfying the approximate gradient projection … Read more

Exploiting Low-Rank Structure in Semidefinite Programming by Approximate Operator Splitting

In contrast with many other convex optimization classes, state-of-the-art semidefinite programming solvers are yet unable to efficiently solve large scale instances. This work aims to reduce this scalability gap by proposing a novel proximal algorithm for solving general semidefinite programming problems. The proposed methodology, based on the primal-dual hybrid gradient method, allows the presence of … Read more

Delay and disruption management at ATM: technical details

Most of the local public transit companies have vehicle monitoring systems able to collect huge quantities of data in real-time. Typically, these data are used to measure the performance of the transportation system, and rarely they are fully exploited to improve it and to tackle disruptions. In this report we take into consideration the case … Read more