Cuts over Extended Formulations by Flow Discretization

Large-sized extended formulations have the potential for providing high-quality bounds on some combinatorial optimization problems where the natural formulations perform poorly. This chapter discusses the use of some families of cuts that have been recently applied on extended formulations that are obtained by the discretization of the continuous variables occurring in the natural formulation of … Read more

A Proof by the Simplex Method for the Diameter of a (0,1)-Polytope

Naddef shows that the Hirsch conjecture is true for (0,1)-polytopes by proving that the diameter of any $(0,1)$-polytope in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space is at most $d$. In this short paper, we give a simple proof for the diameter. The proof is based on the number of solutions generated by the simplex method for a linear … Read more

Sell or Hold: a simple two-stage stochastic combinatorial optimization problem

There are $n$ individual assets and $k$ of them are to be sold over two stages. The first-stage prices are known and the second-stage prices have a known distribution. The sell or hold problem (SHP) is to determine which assets are to be sold at each stage to maximize the total expected revenue. We show … Read more

Dynamic Graph Generation for Large Scale Operational Train Timetabling

The aim of operational train timetabling is to find a conflict free timetable for a set of passenger and freight trains with predefined stopping time windows along given routes in an infrastructure network so that station capacities and train dependent running and headway times are observed. Typical models for this problem are based on time-discretized … Read more

Removing critical nodes from a graph: complexity results and polynomial algorithms for the case of bounded treewidth

We consider the problem of deleting a limited number of nodes from a graph in order to minimize a connectivity measure between the surviving nodes. We prove that the problem is $NP$-complete even on quite particular types of graph, and define a dynamic programming recursion that solves the problem in polynomial time when the graph … Read more

Branch and cut algorithms for detecting critical nodes in undirected graphs

In this paper we deal with the critical node problem, where a given number of nodes has to be removed from an undirected graph in order to maximize the disconnections between the node pairs of the graph. We propose an integer linear programming model with a non-polynomial number of constraints but whose linear relaxation can … Read more

Complexity results for the gap inequalities for the max-cut problem

In 1996, Laurent and Poljak introduced an extremely general class of cutting planes for the max-cut problem, called gap inequalities. We prove several results about them, including the following: (i) there must exist non-dominated gap inequalities with gap larger than 1, unless NP = co-NP; (ii) there must exist non-dominated gap inequalities with exponentially large … Read more

The Complexity of Egalitarian Mechanisms for Linear Programming Games

We show that the most cost-efficient subset problem for linear programming games is NP-hard, and in fact inapproximable within a constant factor in polynomial time, unless P = NP. This in turn implies that computing the prices output by an egalitarian mechanism and computing a cost allocation in the equal split-off set for linear programming … Read more

Multi-objective GRASP with path-relinking

In this paper we propose an adaptation of the GRASP metaheuristic to solve multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems. In particular we describe several alternatives to specialize the construction and improvement components of GRASP when two or more objectives are considered. GRASP has been successfully coupled with path-relinking for single-objective optimization. In this paper, we propose different … Read more

Unharnessing the power of Schrijver’s permanental inequality

Let $A \in \Omega_n$ be doubly-stochastic $n \times n$ matrix. Alexander Schrijver proved in 1998 the following remarkable inequality \begin{equation} \label{le} per(\widetilde{A}) \geq \prod_{1 \leq i,j \leq n} (1- A(i,j)); \widetilde{A}(i,j) =: A(i,j)(1-A(i,j)), 1 \leq i,j \leq n \end{equation} We prove in this paper the following generalization (or just clever reformulation) of (\ref{le}):\\ For all … Read more