Nash Equilibrium in a Pay-as-bid Electricity Market: Part 2 – Best Response of a Producer

We consider a multi-leader-common-follower model of a pay-as-bid electricity market in which the producers provide the regulator with either linear or quadratic bids. We prove that for a given producer only linear bids can maximise his profit. Such linear bids are referred as the “best response” of the given producer. They are obtained assuming the … Read more

The stochastic vehicle routing problem, a literature review, part I: models

Building on the work of Gendreau, Laporte, and Seguin (1996), we review the past 20 years of scientific literature on stochastic vehicle routing problems (SVRP). The numerous variants of the problem that have been studied in the literature are described and categorized. Also a thorough review of solution methods applied to the SVRP is included … Read more

Risk-averse portfolio selection of renewable electricity generator investments in Brazil: An optimised multi-market commercialisation strategy

Investment decisions in renewable energy sources such as small hydro, wind power, biomass and solar are frequently made in the context of enormous uncertainty surrounding both intermittent generation and the highly volatile electricity spot prices that are used for clearing of trades. This paper presents a new portfolio-based approach for selecting long-term investments in small-scale … Read more

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Occasional Drivers

We consider a setting in which a company not only has a fleet of capacitated vehicles and drivers available to make deliveries, but may also use the services of occasional drivers who are willing to make a single delivery using their own vehicle in return for a small compensation if the delivery location is not … Read more

A branch-price-and-cut algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and multiple deliverymen

We address a variant of the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) that includes the decision of how many deliverymen should be assigned to each vehicle. In this variant, the service time at each customer depends on the size of the respective demand and on the number of deliverymen assigned to visit this customer. … Read more

Vehicle Routing with Roaming Delivery Locations

We propose the vehicle routing problem with roaming delivery locations (VRPRDL) to model an innovation in last-mile delivery where a customer’s order is delivered to the trunk of his car. We develop construction and improvement heuristics for the VRPRDL based on two problem-specific techniques: (1) efficiently optimizing the delivery locations for a fixed customer delivery … Read more

Infinite horizon optimal policy for an inventory system with two types of products sharing common hardware platforms

We consider a periodic review inventory system and present its optimal policy in the infinite horizon setting. The optimal inventory policy that maximizes the infinite horizon expected discount profit for the model is analytically obtained by relating to the finite horizon setting using results from variational analysis. Results are provided that elucidate the operations of … Read more

Bulk Ship Fleet Renewal and Deployment under Uncertainty: A Multi-Stage Stochastic Programming Approach

We study a maritime fleet renewal and deployment problem under demand and charter cost uncertainty. A decision-maker for an industrial bulk shipping company must determine a suitable fleet size, mix, and deployment strategy to satisfy stochastic demand over a given planning horizon. She may acquire vessels in two ways: time chartering and voyage chartering. Time … Read more

ADMM for the SDP relaxation of the QAP

The semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation has proven to be extremely strong for many hard discrete optimization problems. This is in particular true for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP), arguably one of the hardest NP-hard discrete optimization problems. There are several difficulties that arise in efficiently solving the SDP relaxation, e.g., increased dimension; inefficiency of the … Read more

Strengthening the SDP Relaxation of AC Power Flows with Convex Envelopes, Bound Tightening, and Lifted Nonlinear Cuts

This paper considers state-of-the-art convex relaxations for the AC power flow equations and introduces new valid cuts based on convex envelopes and lifted nonlinear constraints. These valid linear inequalities strengthen existing semidefinite and quadratic programming relaxations and dominate existing cuts proposed in the litterature. Together with model intersections and bound tightening, the new linear cuts … Read more