An inexact proximal bundle method with applications to convex conic programming

We present an inexact bundle method for minimizing an unconstrained convex sup-function with an open domain. Under some mild assumptions, we reformulate a convex conic programming problem as such problem in terms of the support function. This method is a first-order method, hence it requires much less computational cost in each iteration than second-order approaches … Read more

An Enhanced Spatial Branch-and-Bound Method in Global Optimization with Nonconvex Constraints

We discuss some difficulties in determining valid upper bounds in spatial branch-and-bound methods for global minimization in the presence of nonconvex constraints. In fact, two examples illustrate that standard techniques for the construction of upper bounds may fail in this setting. Instead, we propose to perturb infeasible iterates along Mangasarian-Fromovitz directions to feasible points whose … Read more

Analytical formulas for calculating the extremal ranks and inertias of + BXB^{*}$ when $ is a fixed-rank Hermitian matrix

The rank of a matrix and the inertia of a square matrix are two of the most generic concepts in matrix theory for describing the dimension of the row/column vector space and the sign distribution of the eigenvalues of the matrix. Matrix rank and inertia optimization problems are a class of discontinuous optimization problems, in … Read more

Quadratic Outer Approximation for Convex Integer Programming

We present a quadratic outer approximation scheme for solving general convex integer programs, where suitable quadratic approximations are used to underestimate the objective function instead of classical linear approximations. As a resulting surrogate problem we consider the problem of minimizing a function given as the maximum of finitely many convex quadratic functions having the same … Read more

Biased and unbiased random-key genetic algorithms: An experimental analysis

We study the runtime performance of three types of random-key genetic algorithms: the unbiased algorithm of Bean (1994); the biased algorithm of Gonçalves and Resende (2011); and a greedy version of Bean’s algorithm on 12 instances from four types of covering problems: general-cost set covering, Steiner triple covering, general-cost set K-covering, and unit-cost covering by … Read more

BILEVEL OPTIMIZATION AS A REGULARIZATION APPROACH TO PSEUDOMONOTONE EQUILIBRIUM PROBLEMS

We investigate some properties of an inexact proximal point method for pseudomonotone equilibrium problems in a real Hilbert space. Un- like monotone case, in pseudomonotone case, the regularized subprob- lems may not be strongly monotone, even not pseudomonotone. How- ever, every proximal trajectory weakly converges to the same limit, We use these properties to extend … Read more

STOCHASTIC OPTIMIZATION OVER A PARETO SET ASSOCIATED WITH A STOCHASTIC MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION PROBLEM

We deal with the problem of minimizing the expectation of a real valued random function over the weakly Pareto or Pareto set associated with a Stochastic Multi-Objective Optimization Problem (SMOP) whose objectives are expectations of random functions. Assuming that the closed form of these expectations is difficult to obtain, we apply the Sample Average Approximation … Read more

Differerential Evolution methods based on local searches

In this paper we analyze the behavior of a quite standard Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm applied to the objective function transformed by means of local searches. First some surprising results are presented which concern the application of this method to standard test functions. Later we introduce an application to disk- and to sphere-packing problems, two … Read more

Branch-and-Sandwich: A Deterministic Global Optimization Algorithm for Optimistic Bilevel Programming Problems

We present a global optimization algorithm, Branch-and-Sandwich, for optimistic bilevel programming problems which satisfy a regularity condition in the inner problem. The functions involved are assumed to be nonconvex and twice continuously differentiable. The proposed approach can be interpreted as the exploration of two solution spaces (corresponding to the inner and the outer problems) using … Read more

A Reliable Affine Relaxation Method for Global Optimization

An automatic method for constructing linear relaxations of constrained global optimization problems is proposed. Such a construction is based on affine and interval arithmetics and uses operator overloading. These linear programs have exactly the same numbers of variables and of inequality constraints as the given problems. Each equality constraint is replaced by two inequalities. This … Read more