Efficient Propagation Techniques for Handling Cyclic Symmetries in Binary Programs

The presence of symmetries of binary programs typically degrade the performance of branch-and-bound solvers. In this article, we derive efficient variable fixing algorithms to discard symmetric solutions from the search space based on propagation techniques for cyclic groups. Our algorithms come with the guarantee to find all possible variable fixings that can be derived from … Read more

Discrete Optimal Transport with Independent Marginals is #P-Hard

We study the computational complexity of the optimal transport problem that evaluates the Wasserstein distance between the distributions of two K-dimensional discrete random vectors. The best known algorithms for this problem run in polynomial time in the maximum of the number of atoms of the two distributions. However, if the components of either random vector … Read more

The polytope of binary sequences with bounded variation

We investigate the problem of optimizing a linear objective function over the set of all binary vectors of length n with bounded variation, where the latter is defined as the number of pairs of consecutive entries with different value. This problem arises naturally in many applications, e.g., in unit commitment problems or when discretizing binary … Read more