Techniques and methods of linear optimization underwent a significant improvement in the 20th century which led to the development of reliable mixed integer linear programming (MILP) solvers. It would be useful if these solvers could handle mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems. Piecewise linear approximation (PLA) is one of most popular methods used to transform nonlinear problems into linear ones. This paper will introduce PLA with brief a background and literature review, followed by describing our contribution before presenting the results of computational experiments and our findings. The goals of this paper are (a) improving PLA models by using nonuniform domain partitioning, and (b) proposing an idea of applying PLA partially on MINLP problems, making them easier to handle. The computational experiments were done using quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) and MIQCQP and they showed that problems under PLA with nonuniform partition resulted in more accurate solutions and required less time compared to PLA with uniform partition.
Citation
Mathematics 2022, 10(2), 198