Computing in Operations Research using Julia

The state of numerical computing is currently characterized by a divide between highly efficient yet typically cumbersome low-level languages such as C, C++, and Fortran and highly expressive yet typically slow high-level languages such as Python and MATLAB. This paper explores how Julia, a modern programming language for numerical computing which claims to bridge this … Read more

On parallelizing dual decomposition in stochastic integer programming

For stochastic mixed-integer programs, we revisit the dual decomposition algorithm of Car\o{}e and Schultz from a computational perspective with the aim of its parallelization. We address an important bottleneck of parallel execution by identifying a formulation that permits the parallel solution of the \textit{master} program by using structure-exploiting interior-point solvers. Our results demonstrate the potential … Read more

Parallel distributed-memory simplex for large-scale stochastic LP problems

We present a parallelization of the revised simplex method for large extensive forms of two-stage stochastic linear programming (LP) problems. These problems have been considered too large to solve with the simplex method; instead, decomposition approaches based on Benders decomposition or, more recently, interior-point methods are generally used. However, these approaches do not provide optimal … Read more

Scalable Stochastic Optimization of Complex Energy Systems

We present a scalable approach and implementation for solving stochastic programming problems, with application to the optimization of complex energy systems under uncertainty. Stochastic programming is used to make decisions in the present while incorporating a model of uncertainty about future events (scenarios). These problems present serious computational difficulties as the number of scenarios becomes … Read more

On the parallel solution of dense saddle-point linear systems arising in stochastic programming

We present a novel approach for solving dense saddle-point linear systems in a distributed-memory environment. This work is motivated by an application in stochastic optimization problems with recourse, but the proposed approach can be used for a large family of dense saddle-point systems, in particular those arising in convex programming. Although stochastic optimization problems have … Read more