We study a problem faced by a major beverage producer. The company produces and distributes several brands to various customers from its regional distributors. For some of these brands, most customers do not have enough demand to justify full pallet shipments. Therefore, the company decided to design a number of mixed or “rainbow” pallets so … Read more
New observations are made about two lower bound schemes for single-machine min-sum scheduling problems. We find that the strongest bound of those provided by transportation problem relaxations can be computed by solving a linear program. We show the equivalence of this strongest bound and the bound provided by the LP relaxation of the time-indexed integer … Read more
This paper first presents an improve cutting plane method for solving the linear programming problems, based on the primal simplex method with the current equivalent facet technique, in which the increment of objection function is allowed as a pivot variable to decide the search step size. We obtain a strong valid inequality from the objective … Read more
For a real world problem — transporting pallets between warehouses in order to guarantee sufficient supply for known and additional stochastic demand — we propose a solution approach via convex relaxation of an integer programming formulation, suitable for online optimization. The essential new element linking routing and inventory management is a convex piecewise linear cost … Read more
In this paper, we study the conflict-free assignment of wavelengths to lightpaths in an optical network with the opportunity to place wavelength converters. To benchmark heuristics for the problem, we develop integer programming formulations and study their properties. Moreover, we study the computational performance of the column generation algorithm for solving the linear relaxation of … Read more
In this paper we present a restructuring of the computations in Lenstra’s methods for solving mixed integer linear programs. We show that the problem of finding a good branching hyperplane can be formulated on an adjoint lattice of the Kernel lattice of the equality constraints without requiring any dimension reduction. As a consequence the short … Read more
Both cutting plane methods and traditional decomposition methods are procedures that compute a bound on the optimal value of an integer linear program (ILP) by constructing an approximation to the convex hull of feasible solutions. This approximation is obtained by intersecting the polyhedron associated with the continuous relaxation, which has an explicit representation, with an … Read more
We present a scheme for generating new valid inequalities for mixed integer programs by taking pair-wise combinations of existing valid inequalities. Our scheme is related to mixed integer rounding and mixing. The scheme is in general sequence-dependent and therefore leads to an exponential number of inequalities. For some important cases, we identify combination sequences that … Read more
In this paper, we study the minimum converter wavelength assignment problem in optical networks. To benchmark the quality of solutions obtained by heuristics, we derive an integer programming formulation by generalizing the formulation of Mehrotra and Trick (1996) for the vertex coloring problem. To handle the exponential number of variables, we propose a column generation … Read more
Energy, a fundamental entity of modern life, is usually produced using fossil fuels as the primary raw material. A consequence of burning fossil fuels is the emission of environmentally harmful substances. Energy production systems generate steam and electricity that are served to different process customers to satisfy their energy requirement. The improvement of economical and … Read more