A Branch-and-Benders-Cut Algorithm for the Road Restoration Crew Scheduling and Routing Problem

Extreme events such as disasters cause partial or total disruption of basic services such as water, energy, communication and transportation. In particular, roads can be damaged or blocked by debris, thereby obstructing access to certain affected areas. Thus, restoration of the damaged roads is necessary to evacuate victims and distribute emergency commodities to relief centers … Read more

Facets from Gadgets

We present a new tool for generating cutting planes for NP-hard combinatorial optimisation problems. It is based on the concept of gadgets — small subproblems that are “glued” together to form hard problems — which we borrow from the literature on computational complexity. Using gadgets, we are able to derive huge (exponentially large) new families … Read more

Binary Extended Formulations of Polyhedral Mixed-integer Sets

We analyze different ways of constructing binary extended formulations of polyhedral mixed-integer sets with bounded integer variables and compare their relative strength with respect to split cuts. We show that among all binary extended formulations where each bounded integer variable is represented by a distinct collection of binary variables, what we call “unimodular” extended formulations … Read more

The Strength of Multi-row Aggregation Cuts for Sign-pattern Integer Programs

In this paper, we study the strength of aggregation cuts for sign-pattern integer programs (IPs). Sign-pattern IPs are a generalization of packing IPs and are of the form {x \in Z^n | Ax = 0} where for a given column j, A_{ij} is either non-negative for all i or non-positive for all i. Our first … Read more

Approximation of Minimal Functions by Extreme Functions

In a recent paper, Basu, Hildebrand, and Molinaro established that the set of continuous minimal functions for the 1-dimensional Gomory-Johnson infinite group relaxation possesses a dense subset of extreme functions. The n-dimensional version of this result was left as an open question. In the present paper, we settle this query in the affirmative: for any … Read more

Optimal cutting planes from the group relaxations

We study quantitative criteria for evaluating the strength of valid inequalities for Gomory and Johnson’s finite and infinite group models and we describe the valid inequalities that are optimal for these criteria. We justify and focus on the criterion of maximizing the volume of the nonnegative orthant cut off by a valid inequality. For the … Read more

Stabilized Benders methods for large-scale combinatorial optimization, with application to data privacy

The Cell Suppression Problem (CSP) is a challenging Mixed-Integer Linear Problem arising in statistical tabular data protection. Medium sized instances of CSP involve thousands of binary variables and million of continuous variables and constraints. However, CSP has the typical structure that allows application of the renowned Benders’ decomposition method: once the “complicating” binary variables are … Read more

Lower bounds on the lattice-free rank for packing and covering integer programs

In this paper, we present lower bounds on the rank of the split closure, the multi-branch closure and the lattice-free closure for packing sets as a function of the integrality gap. We also provide a similar lower bound on the split rank of covering polyhedra. These results indicate that whenever the integrality gap is high, … Read more

A Benders squared (B2) framework for infinite-horizon stochastic linear programs

We propose a nested decomposition scheme for infinite-horizon stochastic linear programs. Our approach can be seen as a provably convergent extension of stochastic dual dynamic programming to the infinite-horizon setting: we explore a sequence of finite-horizon problems of increasing length until we can prove convergence with a given confidence level. The methodology alternates between a … Read more

Facets for Single Module and Multi-Module Capacitated Lot-Sizing Problems without Backlogging

In this paper, we consider the well-known constant-batch lot-sizing problem, which we refer to as the single module capacitated lot-sizing (SMLS) problem, and multi-module capacitated lot-sizing (MMLS) problem. We provide sufficient conditions under which the (k,l,S,I) inequalities of Pochet and Wolsey (Math of OR 18: 767-785, 1993), the mixed (k,l,S,I) inequalities, derived using mixing procedure … Read more