Who Has Access to E-Commerce and When? Time-Varying Service Regions in Same-Day Delivery

Motivated by access and equity issues in e-commerce, we study the design of same-day delivery (SDD) systems under the assumption that service regions are allowed to vary over the course of the day; equivalently, that customers in different locations may have access to SDD for different lengths of time over the service day or may … Read more

On a Computationally Ill-Behaved Bilevel Problem with a Continuous and Nonconvex Lower Level

It is well known that bilevel optimization problems are hard to solve both in theory and practice. In this paper, we highlight a further computational difficulty when it comes to solving bilevel problems with continuous but nonconvex lower levels. Even if the lower-level problem is solved to ɛ-feasibility regarding its nonlinear constraints for an arbitrarily … Read more

Decision Diagrams for Discrete Optimization: A Survey of Recent Advances

In the last decade, decision diagrams (DDs) have been the basis for a large array of novel approaches for modeling and solving optimization problems. Many techniques now use DDs as a key tool to achieve state-of-the-art performance within other optimization paradigms, such as integer programming and constraint programming. This paper provides a survey of the … Read more

Models and Algorithms for the Weighted Safe Set Problem

Given a connected graph G = (V, E), a Safe Set S is a subset of the vertex set V such that the cardinality of each connected component in the subgraph induced by V \ S does not exceed the cardinality of any neighbor connected component in the subgraph induced by S. When the vertices … Read more

Faster exact solution of sparse MaxCut and QUBO problems

The maximum-cut problem is one of the fundamental problems in combinatorial optimization. With the advent of quantum computers, both the maximum-cut and the equivalent quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem have experienced much interest in recent years. This article aims to advance the state of the art in the exact solution of both problems-by using mathematical … Read more

Fleet & tail assignment under uncertainty

Airlines solve many different optimization problems and combine the resulting solutions to ensure smooth, minimum-cost operations. Crucial problems are the Fleet Assignment, which assigns aircraft types to flights of a given schedule, and the Tail Assignment, which determines individual flight sequences to be performed by single aircraft. In order to find a cost-optimal solution, many … Read more

Adaptive Nonlinear Optimization of District Heating Networks Based on Model and Discretization Catalogs

We propose an adaptive optimization algorithm for operating district heating networks in a stationary regime. The behavior of hot water flow in the pipe network is modeled using the incompressible Euler equations and a suitably chosen energy equation. By applying different simplifications to these equations, we derive a catalog of models. Our algorithm is based … Read more

The impact of passive social media viewers in influence maximization

A frequently studied problem in the context of digital marketing for online social networks is the influence maximization problem that seeks for an initial seed set of influencers to trigger an information propagation cascade (in terms of active message forwarders) of expected maximum impact. Previously studied problems typically neglect that the probability that individuals passively … Read more

Dynamic courier capacity acquisition in rapid delivery systems: a deep Q-learning approach

With the recent boom of the gig economy, urban delivery systems have experienced substantial demand growth. In such systems, orders are delivered to customers from local distribution points respecting a delivery time promise. An important example is a restaurant meal delivery system, where delivery times are expected to be minutes after an order is placed. … Read more

The Chvátal-Gomory Procedure for Integer SDPs with Applications in Combinatorial Optimization

In this paper we study the well-known Chvátal-Gomory (CG) procedure for the class of integer semidefinite programs (ISDPs). We prove several results regarding the hierarchy of relaxations obtained by iterating this procedure. We also study different formulations of the elementary closure of spectrahedra. A polyhedral description of the elementary closure for a specific type of … Read more