The Flow Shop Problem (FSP) is known to be NP-hard when more than three machines are considered. Thus, for non-trivial size problem instances, heuristics are needed to find good orderings. We consider the permutation case of this problem. For this case, denoted by F|prmu|Cmax, the sequence of jobs has to remain the same at each … Read more
A method for finding all roots of a system of nonlinear equations is described. Our method makes use of C-GRASP, a recently proposed continuous global optimization heuristic. Given a nonlinear system, we solve a corresponding adaptively modified global optimization problem multiple times, each time using C-GRASP, with areas of repulsion around roots that have already … Read more
Network migration scheduling is the problem where inter-nodal traffic from an outdated telecommunications network is to be migrated to a new network. Nodes are migrated, one at each time period, from the old to the new network. All traffic originating or terminating at given node in the old network is moved to a specific node … Read more
In this paper we apply the semidefinite programming approach developed by the authors to obtain new upper bounds for codes in spherical caps. We compute new upper bounds for the one-sided kissing number in several dimensions where we in particular get a new tight bound in dimension 8. Furthermore we show how to use the … Read more
The quadratic assignment problem (\QAP) is arguably one of the hardest of the NP-hard discrete optimization problems. Problems of dimension greater than 20 are considered to be large scale. Current successful solution techniques depend on branch and bound methods. However, it is difficult to get \emph{strong and inexpensive} bounds. In this paper we introduce a … Read more
Semidefinite relaxations of the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) have recently turned out to provide good approximations to the optimal value of QAP. We take a systematic look at various conic relaxations of QAP. We first show that QAP can equivalently be formulated as a linear program over the cone of completely positive matrices. Since it … Read more
A classical theorem in Combinatorial Optimization proves the existence of fully polynomial- time approximation schemes for the knapsack problem. In a recent paper, Van Vyve and Wolsey ask whether for each 0 < epsilon ≤ 1 there exists an extended formulation for the knapsack problem, of size polynomial in the number of variables and/or 1/epsilon ... Read more
In the seminal work [1] L. Lovász introduced the concept of an orthonormal representation of a graph, and also a related value, now popularly known as the Lováasz number of the graph. One of the remarkable properties of the Lovász number is that it lies sandwiched between the stability number and the complementer chromatic number. … Read more
Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are estimated to be one of the leading causes of death. Many national and international agencies have set up databases of ADR reports for the express purpose of determining the relationship between drugs and adverse reactions that they cause. We formulate the drug-reaction relationship problem as a continuous optimization problem and … Read more
We prove that cutting-plane proofs which use split cuts have exponential length in the worst case. Split cuts, defined by Cook, Kannan, Schrijver (1993), are known to be equivalent to a number of other classes of cuts, namely mixed-integer rounding (MIR) cuts, Gomory mixed-integer cuts, and disjunctive cuts. Our result thus implies the exponential worst-case … Read more