Akshay Gupte We study a two-stage stochastic combinatorial optimization problem that integrates fleet-sizing, assignment, routing, and scheduling problems. Although this problem has wide applicability, it arises in particular in the home healthcare industry where a service team of caregivers have to be assigned to patients and put in vehicle fleet that have to be routed amongst the … Read more
We present an infinite family of linear valid inequalities for a mixed-integer conic program, and prove that these inequalities describe the convex hull of the feasible set when this set is bounded and described by integral data. The main element of our proof is to establish a new strong superadditive dual for mixed-integer conic programming … Read more
\(\) Computing the maximum size of an independent set in a graph is a famously hard combinatorial problem that has been well-studied for various classes of graphs. When it comes to random graphs, only the classical binomial random graph \(G_{n,p}\) has been analysed and shown to have largest independent sets of size \(\Theta(\log{n})\) w.h.p. This … Read more
\(\) The question of finding the largest integer contained between two given lists of integers is trivial when integer ordering is interpreted in its usual way. We propose a nontrivial variant wherein each ordering comparison is performed after integers have been mapped under some bijection, and analyze the computational complexity of our combinatorial problem under … Read more
We present multilinear and mixed-integer multilinear programs to find a Nash equilibrium in multi-player strategic-form games. We compare the formulations to common algorithms in Gambit, and conclude that a multilinear feasibility program finds a Nash equilibrium faster than any of the methods we compare it to, including the quantal response equilibrium method, which is recommended … Read more
The Home Service Assignment, Routing, and Appointment scheduling (H-SARA) problem integrates the strategical fleet-sizing, tactical assignment, operational vehicle routing and scheduling subproblems at different decision levels, with a single period planning horizon and uncertainty (stochasticity) from the service duration, travel time, and customer cancellation rate. We propose a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer linear programming model for … Read more
It is well-known that the convex and concave envelope of a multilinear polynomial over a box are polyhedral functions. Exponential-sized extended and projected formulations for these envelopes are also known. We consider the convexification question for multilinear polynomials that are symmetric with respect to permutations of variables. Such a permutation-invariant structure naturally implies a quadratic-sized … Read more
A conic program is the problem of optimizing a linear function over a closed convex cone intersected with an affine preimage of another cone. We analyse three constraint qualifications, namely a Closedness CQ, Slater CQ, and Boundedness CQ (also called Clark- Duffin theorem), that are sufficient for achieving strong duality and show that the first … Read more
We consider the problem of characterizing the convex hull of the graph of a bilinear function $f$ on the $n$-dimensional unit cube $[0,1]^n$. Extended formulations for this convex hull are obtained by taking subsets of the facets of the Boolean Quadric Polytope (BQP). Extending existing results, we propose the systematic study of properties of $f$ … Read more
Convex hulls of monomials have been widely studied in the literature, and monomial convexifications are implemented in global optimization software for relaxing polynomials. However, there has been no study of the error in the global optimum from such approaches. We give bounds on the worst-case error for convexifying a monomial over subsets of $[0,1]^n$. This … Read more