We study a two-stage, finite-scenarios stochastic version of the set multicover problem, where there is uncertainty about a demand for each element to be covered and the penalty cost is imposed linearly on the shortfall in each demand. This problem is NP-hard and has an application in shift scheduling in crowdsourced delivery services. For this … Read more
We study a delivery strategy for last-mile deliveries in urban areas which combines freight transportation with mass mobility systems with the goal of creating synergies contrasting negative externalities caused by transportation. The idea is to use the residual capacity on public transport means for moving freights within the city. In particular, the system is such … Read more
We study the inefficiency of pure Nash equilibria in symmetric unweighted network congestion games defined over series-parallel networks. We introduce a quantity y(D) to upper bound the Price of Anarchy (PoA) for delay functions in class D. When D is the class of polynomial functions with highest degree p, our upper bound is 2^{p+1} − … Read more
We consider the multilinear polytope which arises naturally in binary polynomial optimization. Del Pia and Di Gregorio introduced the class of odd beta-cycle inequalities valid for this polytope, showed that these generally have Chvátal rank 2 with respect to the standard relaxation and that, together with flower inequalities, they yield a perfect formulation for cycle … Read more
A small polygon is a polygon of unit diameter. The maximal area of a small polygon with $n=2m$ vertices is not known when $m \ge 7$. In this paper, we construct, for each $n=2m$ and $m\ge 3$, a small $n$-gon whose area is the maximal value of a one-variable function. We show that, for all … Read more
Since its introduction in the early 2000s, robust optimization with budget uncertainty has received a lot of attention. This is due to the intuitive construction of the uncertainty sets and the existence of a compact robust reformulation for (mixed-integer) linear programs. However, despite its compactness, the reformulation performs poorly when solving robust integer problems due … Read more
Nested multi-level structures are frequently encountered in many real-world optimization problems. Decomposition techniques are a commonly applied approach used to handle nested multi-level structures; however, the typical problem-specific focus of such techniques has led to numerous specialized formulations and solution methods. This lack of generalized results for nested multi-level optimization problems is addressed in this … Read more
Full strong-branching (henceforth referred to as strong-branching) is a well-known variable selection rule that is known experimentally to produce significantly smaller branch-and-bound trees in comparison to all other known variable selection rules. In this paper, we attempt an analysis of the performance of the strong-branching rule both from a theoretical and a computational perspective. On … Read more
We present an algebraic characterization of perfect graphs, i.e., graphs for which the clique number and the chromatic number coincide for every induced subgraph. We show that a graph is perfect if and only if certain nonnegative polynomials associated with the graph are sums of squares. As a byproduct, we obtain several infinite families of … Read more
De Klerk and Pasechnik (2002) introduced the bounds $\vartheta^{(r)}(G)$ ($r\in \mathbb{N}$) for the stability number $\alpha(G)$ of a graph $G$ and conjectured exactness at order $\alpha(G)-1$: $\vartheta^{(\alpha(G)-1)}(G)=\alpha(G)$. These bounds rely on the conic approximations $\mathcal{K}_n^{(r)}$ by Parrilo (2000) for the copositive cone $\text{COP}_n$. A difficulty in the convergence analysis of $\vartheta^{(r)}$ is the bad behaviour … Read more