Interdicting Low-Diameter Cohesive Subgroups in Large-Scale Social Networks

The s-clubs model cohesive social subgroups as vertex subsets that induce subgraphs of diameter at most s. In defender-attacker settings, for low values of s, they can represent tightly-knit communities whose operation is undesirable for the defender. For instance, in online social networks, large communities of malicious accounts can effectively propagate undesirable rumors. In this … Read more

Energy-efficient Automated Vertical Farms

Autonomous vertical farms (VFs) are becoming increasingly more popular, because they allow to grow food minimising water consumption and the use of pesticides, while greatly increasing the yield per square metre, compared with traditional agriculture. To meet sustainability goals, however, VFs must operate at maximum efficiency; it would be otherwise impossible to compete with the … Read more

Solving a Class of Cut-Generating Linear Programs via Machine Learning

Cut-generating linear programs (CGLPs) play a key role as a separation oracle to produce valid inequalities for the feasible region of mixed-integer programs. When incorporated inside branch-and-bound, the cutting planes obtained from CGLPs help to tighten relaxations and improve dual bounds. However, running the CGLPs at the nodes of the branch-and-bound tree is computationally cumbersome … Read more

Solving Graph Partitioning on Sparse Graphs: Cuts, Projections, and Extended Formulations

This paper explores new solution approaches for the graph partitioning problem. While the classic formulations for graph partitioning are compact, they either suffer from a poor relaxation, symmetry, or contain a cubic number of constraints regardless of the graph density. These shortcomings often result in poor branch-and-bound performance. We approach this problem from perspective of … Read more

A primal heuristic to compute an upper bound set for multi-objective 0-1 linear optimisation problems

This paper presents an algorithm aiming to compute an upper bound set for a multi-objective linear optimisation problem with binary variables (p-01LP). Inspired by the well known « Feasibility Pump » algorithm in single objective optimisation, it belongs to the class of primal heuristics. The proposed algorithm, named « Gravity Machine », aims to deal … Read more

Polyhedral Analysis of a Polytope from a Service Center Location Problem with a Special Decision-Dependent Customer Demand

This paper establishes and analyzes a service center location model with a simple but novel decision-dependent demand induced from a maximum attraction principle. The model formulations are investigated in the distributionally-robust optimization framework for the capacitated and uncapacitated cases. A statistical model that is based on the maximum attraction principle for estimating customer demand and … Read more

A Penalty Branch-and-Bound Method for Mixed-Binary Linear Complementarity Problems

Linear complementarity problems (LCPs) are an important modeling tool for many practically relevant situations but also have many important applications in mathematics itself. Although the continuous version of the problem is extremely well studied, much less is known about mixed-integer LCPs (MILCPs) in which some variables have to be integer-valued in a solution. In particular, … Read more

Dealing with inequality constraints in large scale semidefinite relaxations for graph coloring and maximum clique problems

Semidefinite programs (SDPs) can be solved in polynomial time by interior point methods. However, when the dimension of the problem gets large, interior point methods become impractical both in terms of computational time and memory requirements. First order methods, such as Alternating Direction Methods of Multipliers (ADMMs), turned out to be suitable algorithms to deal … Read more

The Graphical Traveling Salesperson Problem has no Integer Programming Formulation in the Original Space

The Graphical Traveling Salesperson Problem (GTSP) is the problem of assigning, for a given weighted graph, a nonnegative number x_e to each edge e such that the induced multi-subgraph is of minimum weight among those that are spanning, connected and Eulerian. Naturally, known mixed-integer programming formulations use integer variables x_e in addition to others. Denis … Read more

New complexity results and algorithms for min-max-min robust combinatorial optimization

In this work we investigate the min-max-min robust optimization problem applied to combinatorial problems with uncertain cost-vectors which are contained in a convex uncertainty set. The idea of the approach is to calculate a set of k feasible solutions which are worst-case optimal if in each possible scenario the best of the k solutions would … Read more