Leo Liberti Automatic verification of computer code is of paramount importance in embedded systems supplying essential services. One of the most important verification techniques is static code analysis by abstract interpretation: the concrete semantics of a programming language (i.e.the values $\chi$ that variable symbols {\tt x} appearing in a program can take during its execution) are replaced … Read more
The best known method to find exact or at least epsilon-approximate solutions to polynomial programming problems is the spatial Branch-and-Bound algorithm, which rests on computing lower bounds to the value of the objective function to be minimized on each region that it explores. These lower bounds are often computed by solving convex relaxations of the … Read more
If a mathematical program (be it linear or nonlinear) has many symmetric optima, solving it via Branch-and-Bound techniques often yields search trees of disproportionate sizes; thus, finding and exploiting symmetries is an important task. We propose a method for automatically finding the formulation group of any given Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Program, and reformulating the problem so … Read more
The computation of point-to-point shortest paths on time-dependent road networks has a large practical interest, but very few works propose efficient algorithms for this problem. We propose a novel approach which tackles one of the main complications of route planning in time-dependent graphs, which is the difficulty of using bidirectional search: since the exact arrival … Read more
Within the context of solving Mixed-Integer Linear Programs by a Branch-and-Cut algorithm, we propose a new strategy for branching. Computational experiments show that, on the majority of our test instances, this approach enumerates fewer nodes than traditional branching. On average, on instances that contain both integer and continuous variables the number of nodes in the … Read more
Many industrial problems can be naturally formulated using Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP). Motivated by the demand for Open-Source solvers for real-world MINLP problems, we have developed a spatial Branch-and-Bound software package named COUENNE (Convex Over- and Under-ENvelopes for Nonlinear Estimation). In this paper, we present the structure of couenne and discuss in detail our … Read more
The Hartree-Fock method is well known in quantum chemistry, and widely used to obtain atomic and molecular eletronic wave functions, based on the minimization of a functional of the energy. This gives rise to a multi-extremal, nonconvex, polynomial optimization problem. We give a novel mathematical programming formulation of the problem, which we solve by using … Read more
We present a compact linearization for a broad class of bilinear 0-1 mixed-integer problems subject to assignment constraints. We apply the linearization to three classes of problems: quadratic assignment, multiprocessor scheduling with communication delays, and graph partitioning, and show that it yields faster solution times. Citation DEI, Politecnico di Milano, Working paper, April 2005. Article … Read more