Recent Progress Using Matheuristics for Strategic Maritime Inventory Routing

This paper presents an extensive computational study of simple, but prominent matheuristics (i.e., heuristics that rely on mathematical programming models) to fi nd high quality ship schedules and inventory policies for a class of maritime inventory routing problems. Our computational experiments are performed on a set of the publicly available MIRPLib instances. This class of inventory … Read more

An optimization-based approach for delivering radio-pharmaceuticals to medical imaging centers

It is widely recognized that early diagnosis of most types of cancers can increase the chances of full recovery or substantially prolong the life of patients. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) has become the standard way to diagnose many types of cancers by generating high quality images of the affected organs. In order to create an … Read more

Flow formulations for curriculum-based course timetabling

In this paper we present two mixed-integer programming formulations for the curriculum based course timetabling problem (CTT). We show that the formulations contain underlying network structures by dividing the CTT into two separate models and then connect the two models using flow formulation techniques. The first mixed-integer programming formulation is based on an underlying minimum … Read more

Computing Feasible Points for Binary MINLPs with MPECs

Nonconvex mixed-binary nonlinear optimization problems frequently appear in practice and are typically extremely hard to solve. In this paper we discuss a class of primal heuristics that are based on a reformulation of the problem as a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints. We then use different regularization schemes for this class of problems and use … Read more

Mixed-integer linear representability, disjunctions, and Chvatal functions — modeling implications

Jeroslow and Lowe gave an exact geometric characterization of subsets of $\mathbb{R}^n$ that are projections of mixed-integer linear sets, also known as MILP-representable or MILP-R sets. We give an alternate algebraic characterization by showing that a set is MILP-R {\em if and only if} the set can be described as the intersection of finitely many … Read more

The structure of the infinite models in integer programming

The infinite models in integer programming can be described as the convex hull of some points or as the intersection of half-spaces derived from valid functions. In this paper we study the relationships between these two descriptions. Our results have implications for finite dimensional corner polyhedra. One consequence is that nonnegative continuous functions suffice to … Read more

On Dantzig figures from graded lexicographic orders

We construct two families of Dantzig figures, which are $d$-dimensional polytopes with $2d$ facets and an antipodal vertex pair, from convex hulls of initial subsets for the graded lexicographic (grlex) and graded reverse lexicographic (grevlex) orders on $\mathbb{Z}^{d}_{\geq 0}$. These polytopes have the same number of vertices $O(d^2)$ and the same number of edges $O(d^3)$, … Read more

New Constraints and Features for the University Course Timetabling Problem

The university course timetabling problem deals with the task of scheduling lectures of a set of university courses into a given number of rooms and time periods, taking into account various hard and soft constraints. The goal of the International Timetabling Competitions ITC2002 and ITC2007 was to establish models for comparison that cover the most … Read more

Unified approach for solving Box-Constrained models with continuous or discrete variables by Non monotonous Derivative Free Optimization techniques.

This paper describes a unified approach for solving Box-Constrained Optimization Problems (BCOP) in Euclidian spaces. The variables may be either continuous or discrete; in which case, they range on a grid of isolated points regularly spaced. For the continuous case, convergence is shown under standard assumptions; for the discrete case, slight modifications ensure that the … Read more

Distributed domain propagation

Portfolio parallelization is an approach that runs several solver instances in parallel and terminates when one of them succeeds in solving the problem. Despite it’s simplicity portfolio parallelization has been shown to perform well for modern mixed-integer programming (MIP) and boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) solvers. Domain propagation has also been shown to be a simple … Read more