Playing Stackelberg security games in perfect formulations

Protecting critical infrastructure from intentional damage requires foreseeing the strategies of possible attackers. The problem faced by the defender of such infrastructure can be formulated as a Stackelberg security game. A defender must decide what specific targets to protect with limited resources, maximizing their expected utility (e.g., minimizing damage value) and considering that a second … 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

Exact and Heuristic Solution Techniques for Mixed-Integer Quantile Minimization Problems

We consider mixed-integer linear quantile minimization problems that yield large-scale problems that are very hard to solve for real-world instances. We motivate the study of this problem class by two important real-world problems: a maintenance planning problem for electricity networks and a quantile-based variant of the classic portfolio optimization problem. For these problems, we develop … Read more

A Bilevel Optimization Approach to Decide the Feasibility of Bookings in the European Gas Market

The European gas market is organized as a so-called entry-exit system with the main goal to decouple transport and trading. To this end, gas traders and the transmission system operator (TSO) sign so-called booking contracts that grant capacity rights to traders to inject or withdraw gas at certain nodes up to this capacity. On a … Read more

Multi-market Portfolio Optimization with Conditional Value at Risk

In this paper we propose an optimization framework for multi-markets portfolio management, where a central headquarter relies upon local affiliates for the market-wise selection of investment options. Being averse to risk, the headquarter endogenously selects the maximum expected loss (conditional value at risk) for the affiliates, who respond designing portfolios and selecting management fees. In … Read more

A Survey on Mixed-Integer Programming Techniques in Bilevel Optimization

Bilevel optimization is a field of mathematical programming in which some variables are constrained to be the solution of another optimization problem. As a consequence, bilevel optimization is able to model hierarchical decision processes. This is appealing for modeling real-world problems, but it also makes the resulting optimization models hard to solve in theory and … Read more

A dynamic programming approach to segmented isotonic regression

This paper proposes a polynomial-time algorithm to construct the monotone stepwise curve that minimizes the sum of squared errors with respect to a given cloud of data points. The fitted curve is also constrained on the maximum number of steps it can be composed of and on the minimum step length. Our algorithm relies on … Read more

Benders decomposition for Network Design Covering Problems

We consider two covering variants of the network design problem. We are given a set of origin/destination(O/D) pairs and each such O/D pair is covered if there exists a path in the network from the origin to the destination whose length is not larger than a given threshold. In the first problem, called the maximal … Read more

Closing the Gap in Linear Bilevel Optimization: A New Valid Primal-Dual Inequality

Linear bilevel optimization problems are often tackled by replacing the linear lower-level problem with its Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) conditions. The resulting single-level problem can be solved in a branch-and-bound fashion by branching on the complementarity constraints of the lower-level problem’s optimality conditions. While in mixed-integer single-level optimization branch- and-cut has proven to be a powerful extension … Read more

Deciding Feasibility of a Booking in the European Gas Market on a Cycle is in P for the Case of Passive Networks

We show that the feasibility of a booking in the European entry-exit gas market can be decided in polynomial time on single-cycle networks that are passive, i.e., do not contain controllable elements. The feasibility of a booking can be characterized by solving polynomially many nonlinear potential-based flow models for computing so-called potential-difference maximizing load flow … Read more