The main contributions of this thesis are the comparison of existing and the design of new exact approaches based on linear, quadratic and semidefinite relaxations for row layout problems and several applications in logistic. In particular we demonstrate that our suggested semidefinite approach is the strongest exact method to date for most row layout problems. … Read more
Inventory models with lost sales and large lead times have traditionally been considered intractable due to the curse of dimensionality. Recently, Goldberg and co-authors laid the foundations for a new approach to solving these models, by proving that as the lead time grows large, a simple constant-order policy is asymptotically optimal. However, the bounds proven … Read more
We consider the information relaxation approach for calculating performance bounds for stochastic dynamic programs (DPs), following Brown, Smith, and Sun (2010). This approach generates performance bounds by solving problems with relaxed nonanticipativity constraints and a penalty that punishes violations of these constraints. In this paper, we study infinite horizon DPs with discounted costs and consider … Read more
The growing uncertainty associated with the increasing penetration of wind and solar power generation has presented new challenges to the operation of large-scale electric power systems. Motivated by these challenges, we present a multistage adaptive robust optimization model for the most critical daily operational problem of power systems, namely the unit commitment (UC) problem, in … Read more
We consider the directed Steiner tree problem (DSTP) with a constraint on the total number of arcs (hops) in the tree. This problem is known to be NP-hard, and therefore, only heuristics can be applied in the case of its large-scale instances. For the hop-constrained DSTP, we propose local search strategies aimed at improving any … Read more
In this paper we consider multiperiod mixed 0–1 linear programming models under uncertainty. We propose a risk averse strategy using stochastic dominance constraints (SDC) induced by mixed-integer linear recourse as the risk measure. The SDC strategy extends the existing literature to the multistage case and includes both first-order and second-order constraints. We propose a stochastic … Read more
The plethora of research on NP-hard parallel machine scheduling problems is focused on heuristics due to the theoretically and practically challenging nature of these problems. Only a handful of exact approaches are available in the literature, and most of these suffer from scalability issues. Moreover, the majority of the papers on the subject are restricted … Read more
Decision rules provide a flexible toolbox for solving the computationally demanding, multistage adaptive optimization problems. There is a plethora of real-valued decision rules that are highly scalable and achieve good quality solutions. On the other hand, existing binary decision rule structures tend to produce good quality solutions at the expense of limited scalability, and are … Read more
The fraction of customers who choose a particular item from among a set of available items can be increased significantly by the inclusion of a related inferior (and apparently irrelevant) item in the choice set. This violation of the independence from irrelevant alternatives and the regularity properties is called the decoy effect, dominance effect, or … Read more
A new algorithm is proposed to project, exactly and in finite time, a vector of arbitrary size onto a simplex or a l1-norm ball. The algorithm is demonstrated to be faster than existing methods. In addition, a wrong statement in a paper by Duchi et al. is corrected and an adversary sequence for Michelot’s algorithm … Read more