A comparison of different approaches for the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands

The vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands (VRPSD) is a well studied variant of the classic (deterministic) capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) where the customer demands are given by random variables. Two prominent approaches for solving the VRPSD model it either as a chance-constraint program (CC-VRPSD) or as a two-stage stochastic program (2S-VRPSD). In this … Read more

Scalable heuristic algorithm for identifying critical nodes in networks

This paper presents two heuristic algorithms for the distance-based critical node problem (DCNP) that finds k nodes whose removal minimizes the pairwise connection within D hops in the remaining network. The structural properties of the complex networks have not yet been extensively addressed in the literature. Specifically, the community structure of complex networks needs to … Read more

Insertion Heuristics for a Class of Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problems

We consider a simple family of dynamic vehicle routing problems, in which we have a fixed fleet of identical vehicles, and customer requests arrive during the route-planning process. For this kind of problem, it is natural to use an insertion heuristic. We test several such heuristics computationally, on two different variants of the problem. It … Read more

A polyhedral study of multivariate decision trees

Decision trees are a widely used tool for interpretable machine learning. Multivariate decision trees employ hyperplanes at the branch nodes to route datapoints throughout the tree and yield more compact models than univariate trees. Recently, mixed-integer programming (MIP) has been applied to formulate the optimal decision tree problem. To strengthen MIP formulations, it is crucial … Read more

On Constrained Mixed-Integer DR-Submodular Minimization

DR-submodular functions encompass a broad class of functions which are generally non-convex and non-concave. We study the problem of minimizing any DR-submodular function, with continuous and general integer variables, under box constraints and possibly additional monotonicity constraints. We propose valid linear inequalities for the epigraph of any DR-submodular function under the constraints. We further provide … Read more

General Polyhedral Approximation of Two-Stage Robust Linear Programming

\(\) We consider two-stage robust linear programs with uncertain righthand side. We develop a General Polyhedral Approximation (GPA), in which the uncertainty set $\mathcal{U}$ is substituted by a finite set of polytopes derived from the vertex set of an arbitrary polytope that dominates $\mathcal{U}$. The union of the polytopes need not contain $\mathcal{U}$. We analyse … Read more

The Largest Unsolved QAP Instance Tai256c Can Be Converted into A 256-dimensional Simple BQOP with A Single Cardinality Constraint

Tai256c is the largest unsolved quadratic assignment problem (QAP) instance in QAPLIB; a 1.48\% gap remains between the best known feasible objective value and lower bound of the unknown optimal value. This paper shows that the instance can be converted into a 256 dimensional binary quadratic optimization problem (BQOP) with a single cardinality constraint which … Read more

Finding Groups with Maximum Betweenness Centrality via Integer Programming with Random Path Sampling

One popular approach to access the importance/influence of a group of nodes in a network is based on the notion of centrality. For a given group, its group betweenness centrality is computed, first, by evaluating a ratio of shortest paths between each node pair in a network that are “covered” by at least one node … Read more

A Combinatorial Flow-based Formulation for Temporal Bin Packing Problems

We consider two neighboring generalizations of the classical bin packing problem: the temporal bin packing problem (TBPP) and the temporal bin packing problem with fire-ups (TBPP-FU). In both cases, the task is to arrange a set of given jobs, characterized by a resource consumption and an activity window, on homogeneous servers of limited capacity. To … Read more