Optimizing the Trade-Off Between Batching and Waiting: Subadditive Dispatching

Motivated by applications in e-commerce logistics where orders or items arrive at different times and must be dispatched or processed in batches, we propose the subadditive dispatching problem (SAD), a strongly NP-hard problem defined by a set of orders with release times and a non-decreasing subadditive dispatch time function. A single uncapacitated vehicle must dispatch … Read more

An adaptive superfast inexact proximal augmented Lagrangian method for smooth nonconvex composite optimization problems

This work presents an adaptive superfast proximal augmented Lagrangian (AS-PAL) method for solving linearly-constrained smooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. Each iteration of AS-PAL inexactly solves a possibly nonconvex proximal augmented Lagrangian (AL) subproblem obtained by an aggressive/adaptive choice of prox stepsize with the aim of substantially improving its computational performance followed by a full Lagrangian … Read more

Source Detection on Graphs

Spreading processes on networks (graphs) have become ubiquitous in modern society with prominent examples such as infections, rumors, excitations, contaminations, or disturbances. Finding the source of such processes based on observations is important and difficult. We abstract the problem mathematically as an optimization problem on graphs. For the deterministic setting we make connections to the … Read more

Recursive McCormick Linearization of Multilinear Programs

Linear programming (LP) relaxations are widely employed in exact solution methods for multilinear programs (MLP). One example is the family of Recursive McCormick Linearization (RML) strategies, where bilinear products are substituted for artificial variables, which deliver a relaxation of the original problem when introduced together with concave and convex envelopes. In this article, we introduce … Read more

Target-Oriented Regret Minimization for Satisficing Monopolists

We study a robust monopoly pricing problem where a seller aspires to sell an item to a buyer. We assume that the seller, unaware of the buyer’s willingness to pay, ambitiously optimizes over a space of all individual rational and incentive compatible mechanisms with a regret-type objective criterion. Using robust optimization, Kocyigit et al. (2021) … Read more

Asymptotic Consistency for Nonconvex Risk-Averse Stochastic Optimization with Infinite Dimensional Decision Spaces

Optimal values and solutions of empirical approximations of stochastic optimization problems can be viewed as statistical estimators of their true values. From this perspective, it is important to understand the asymptotic behavior of these estimators as the sample size goes to infinity, which is both of theoretical as well as practical interest. This area of … Read more

Efficient composite heuristics for integer bound constrained noisy optimization

This paper discusses a composite algorithm for bound constrained noisy derivative-free optimization problems with integer variables. This algorithm is an integer variant of the matrix adaptation evolution strategy. An integer derivative-free line search strategy along affine scaling matrix directions is used to generate candidate points. Each affine scaling matrix direction is a product of the … Read more

Worst-case evaluation complexity of a derivative-free quadratic regularization method

This short paper presents a derivative-free quadratic regularization method for unconstrained minimization of a smooth function with Lipschitz continuous gradient. At each iteration, trial points are computed by minimizing a quadratic regularization of a local model of the objective function. The models are based on forward finite-difference gradient approximations. By using a suitable acceptance condition … Read more

Dendrograms, Minimum Spanning Trees and Feature Selection

Feature selection is a fundamental process to avoid overfitting and to reduce the size of databases without significant loss of information that applies to hierarchical clustering. Dendrograms are graphical representations of hierarchical clustering algorithms that for single linkage clustering can be interpreted as minimum spanning trees in the complete network defined by the database. In … Read more

Certifying Global Optimality of AC-OPF Solutions via sparse polynomial optimization

We report the experimental results on certifying 1% global optimality of solutions of AC-OPF instances from PGLiB via the CS-TSSOS hierarchy — a moment-SOS based hierarchy that exploits both correlative and term sparsity, which can provide tighter SDP relaxations than Shor’s relaxation. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the CS-TSSOS hierarchy scales well with the problem … Read more