An order aggregation and scheduling problem for meal delivery

We address a single-machine scheduling problem motivated by a last-mile-delivery setting for a food company. Customers place orders, each characterized by a delivery point (customer location) and an ideal delivery time. An order is considered on time if it is delivered to the customer within a time window given by the ideal delivery time ± … Read more

Total Coloring and Total Matching: Polyhedra and Facets

A total coloring of a graph G = (V, E) is an assignment of colors to vertices and edges such that neither two adjacent vertices nor two incident edges get the same color, and, for each edge, the end-points and the edge itself receive a different color. Any valid total coloring induces a partition of … Read more

Beyond Symmetry: Best Submatrix Selection for the Sparse Truncated SVD

Truncated singular value decomposition (SVD), also known as the best low-rank matrix approximation, has been successfully applied to many domains such as biology, healthcare, and others, where high-dimensional datasets are prevalent. To enhance the interpretability of the truncated SVD, sparse SVD (SSVD) is introduced to select a few rows and columns of the original matrix … Read more

A Separation Algorithm for the Simple Plant Location Problem

The Simple Plant Location Problem (SPLP) is a well-known NP-hard optimisation problem with applications in logistics. Although many families of facet-defining inequalities are known for the associated polyhedron, very little work has been done on separation algorithms. We present the first ever polynomial-time separation algorithm for the SPLP that separates exactly over an exponentially large … Read more

The vehicle allocation problem: alternative formulation and branch-and-price method

The Vehicle Allocation Problem (VAP) consists of repositioning empty vehicles across a set of terminals over a given planning horizon so as to maximize the profits generated from serving demand for transportation of goods between pair of terminals. This problem has been classically modeled using an extended space-time network which captures the staging of the … Read more

A MILP Approach to DRAM Access Worst-Case Analysis

The Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) is among the major points of contention in multi-core systems. We consider a challenging optimization problem arising in worst-case performance analysis of systems architectures: computing the worst-case delay (WCD) experienced when accessing the DRAM due to the interference of contending requests. The WCD is a crucial input for micro-architectural … Read more

On the generalized $\vartheta$-number and related problems for highly symmetric graphs

This paper is an in-depth analysis of the generalized $\vartheta$-number of a graph. The generalized $\vartheta$-number, $\vartheta_k(G)$, serves as a bound for both the $k$-multichromatic number of a graph and the maximum $k$-colorable subgraph problem. We present various properties of $\vartheta_k(G)$, such as that the series $(\vartheta_k(G))_k$ is increasing and bounded above by the order … Read more

Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem with release dates via branch-and-cut

In this paper we study the Traveling Salesman Problem with release dates (TSP-rd) and completion time minimization. The TSP-rd considers a single vehicle and a set of customers that must be served exactly once with goods that arrive to the depot over time, during the planning horizon. The time at which each requested good arrives … Read more

Political districting to minimize cut edges

When constructing political districting plans, prominent criteria include population balance, contiguity, and compactness. The compactness of a districting plan, which is often judged by the “eyeball test,” has been quantified in many ways, e.g., Length-Width, Polsby-Popper, and Moment-of-Inertia. This paper considers the number of cut edges, which has recently gained traction in the redistricting literature … Read more

Boole-Bonferroni Inequalities to Approximately Determine Optimal Arrangements

We consider the problem of laying out several objects in an equal number of pre-defined positions. Objects are allowed finitely many orientations, can overlap each other, and must be arranged contiguously. We are particularly interested in the case when the evaluation of the dimensions of the objects requires computational or physical effort. We develop a … Read more