On the generation of symmetry breaking constraints for mathematical programs

Mathematical programs whose formulation is symmetric often take a long time to solve using Branch-and-Bound type algorithms, because of the several symmetric optima. One of the techniques used to decrease the adverse effects of symmetry is adjoining symmetry breaking constraints to the formulation before solving the problem. These constraints aim to make some of the … Read more

Strong Dual for Conic Mixed-Integer Programs

Mixed-integer conic programming is a generalization of mixed-integer linear programming. In this paper, we present an extension of the duality theory for mixed-integer linear programming to the case of mixed-integer conic programming. In particular, we construct a subadditive dual for mixed-integer conic programming problems. Under a simple condition on the primal problem, we are able … Read more

Column Generation for Extended Formulations

Working in an extended variable space allows one to develop tight reformulations for mixed integer programs. However, the size of the extended formulation grows rapidly too large for a direct treatment by a MIP-solver. Then, one can use projection tools and derive valid inequalities for the original formulation, or consider an approximate extended formulation (f.i., … Read more

Solving Mixed Integer Bilinear Problems using MILP formulations

In this paper, we examine a mixed integer linear programming (MIP) reformulation for mixed integer bilinear problems where each bilinear term involves the product of a nonnegative integer variable and a nonnegative continuous variable. This reformulation is obtained by first replacing a general integer variable with its binary expansion and then using McCormick envelopes to … Read more

Coordinated cutting plane generation via multi-objective separation

In cutting plane methods, the question of how to generate the “best possible” set of cuts is both central and crucial. We propose a lexicographic multi-objective cutting plane generation scheme that generates, among all the maximally violated valid inequalities of a given family, an inequality that is undominated and maximally diverse w.r.t. the cuts that … Read more

Computational Experiments with Cross and Crooked Cross Cuts

In a recent paper, Dash, Dey and Gunluk (2010) showed that many families of inequalities for the two-row continuous group relaxation and variants of this relaxation are cross cuts or crooked cross cuts, both of which generalize split cuts. Li and Richard (2008) recently studied t-branch split cuts for mixed-integer programs for integers t >= … Read more

Copositive optimization – recent developments and applications

Due to its versatility, copositive optimization receives increasing interest in the Operational Research community, and is a rapidly expanding and fertile field of research. It is a special case of conic optimization, which consists of minimizing a linear function over a cone subject to linear constraints. The diversity of copositive formulations in different domains of … Read more

Think co(mpletely )positive ! Matrix properties, examples and a clustered bibliography on copositive optimization

Copositive optimization is a quickly expanding scientific research domain with wide-spread applications ranging from global nonconvex problems in engineering to NP-hard combinatorial optimization. It falls into the category of conic programming (optimizing a linear functional over a convex cone subject to linear constraints), namely the cone of all completely positive symmetric nxn matrices, and its … Read more

Exact Approaches to Multi-Level Vertical Orderings

We present a semide nite programming (SDP) approach for the problem of ordering vertices of a layered graph such that the edges of the graph are drawn as vertical as possible. This Multi-Level Vertical Ordering (MLVO) problem is a quadratic ordering problem and conceptually related to the well-studied problem of Multi-Level Crossing Minimization (MLCM). In contrast … Read more

An Outer-Inner Approximation for separable MINLPs

A common structure in convex mixed-integer nonlinear programs is additively separable nonlinear functions consisting of a sum of univariate functions. In the presence of such structures, we propose three improvements to the classical Outer Approximation algorithms that exploit separability. The first improvement is a simple extended formulation. The second a refined outer approximation. Finally, the … Read more