Totally Unimodular Congestion Games

We investigate a new class of congestion games, called Totally Unimodular Congestion Games, in which the strategies of each player are expressed as binary vectors lying in a polyhedron defined using a totally unimodular constraint matrix and an integer right-hand side. We study both the symmetric and the asymmetric variants of the game. In the … Read more

Free-Floating Bike Sharing: Solving Real-life Large-scale Static Rebalancing Problems

Free-floating bike sharing (FFBS) is an innovative bike sharing model. FFBS saves on start-up cost, in comparison to station-based bike sharing (SBBS), by avoiding construction of expensive docking stations and kiosk machines. FFBS prevents bike theft and offers significant opportunities for smart management by tracking bikes in real-time with built-in GPS. However, like SBBS, the … Read more

New Exact Approaches to Row Layout Problems

Given a set of departments, a number of rows and pairwise connectivities between these departments, the multi-row facility layout problem (MRFLP) looks for a non-overlapping arrangement of these departments in the rows such that the weighted sum of the center-to-center distances is minimized. As even small instances of the (MRFLP) are rather challenging, several special … Read more

The Budgeted Minimum Cost Flow Problem with Unit Upgrading Cost

The budgeted minimum cost flow problem (BMCF(K)) with unit upgrading costs extends the classical minimum cost flow problem by allowing to reduce the cost of at most K arcs. In this paper, we consider complexity and algorithms for the special case of an uncapacitated network with just one source. By a reduction from 3-SAT we … Read more

On the computational complexity of minimum-concave-cost flow in a two-dimensional grid

We study the minimum-concave-cost flow problem on a two-dimensional grid. We characterize the computational complexity of this problem based on the number of rows and columns of the grid, the number of different capacities over all arcs, and the location of sources and sinks. The concave cost over each arc is assumed to be evaluated … Read more

Rank aggregation in cyclic sequences

In this paper we propose the problem of finding the cyclic sequence which best represents a set of cyclic sequences. Given a set of elements and a precedence cost matrix we look for the cyclic sequence of the elements which is at minimum distance from all the ranks when the permutation metric distance is the … Read more

Coercive polynomials: Stability, order of growth, and Newton polytopes

In this article we introduce a stability concept for the coercivity of multivariate polynomials $f \in \mathbb{R}[x]$. In particular, we consider perturbations of $f$ by polynomials up to the so-called degree of stable coercivity, and we analyze this stability concept in terms of the corresponding Newton polytopes at infinity. For coercive polynomials $f \in \mathbb{R}[x]$ … Read more

Sum of Squares Basis Pursuit with Linear and Second Order Cone Programming

We devise a scheme for solving an iterative sequence of linear programs (LPs) or second order cone programs (SOCPs) to approximate the optimal value of any semidefinite program (SDP) or sum of squares (SOS) program. The first LP and SOCP-based bounds in the sequence come from the recent work of Ahmadi and Majumdar on diagonally … Read more

On the Lovasz Theta Function and Some Variants

The Lovasz theta function of a graph is a well-known upper bound on the stability number. It can be computed efficiently by solving a semidefinite program (SDP). Actually, one can solve either of two SDPs, one due to Lovasz and the other to Groetschel et al. The former SDP is often thought to be preferable … Read more

Extended Formulations for Vertex Cover

The vertex cover polytopes of graphs do not admit polynomial-size extended formulations. This motivates the search for polyhedral analogues to approximation algorithms and fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithms. While the polyhedral approximability of vertex cover has been studied, we know of no extended formulations parameterized by the size of the vertex cover. To this end, we … Read more