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
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
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
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
We study the convex hull of the feasible set of the semi-continuous knapsack problem, in which the variables belong to the union of two intervals. Besides being important in its own right, the semi-continuous knapsack problem arises in a number of other contexts, e.g. it is a relaxation of general mixed-integer programming. We show how … Read more
Optimum Experimental Design (OED) problems are optimization problems in which an experimental setting and decisions on when to measure – the so-called sampling design – are to be determined such that a follow-up parameter estimation yields accurate results for model parameters. In this paper we use the interpretation of OED as optimal control problems with … Read more
We consider an uncertain variant of the knapsack problem that arises when the exact weight of each item is not exactly known in advance but belongs to a given interval, and the number of items whose weight differs from the nominal value is bounded by a constant. We analyze the worsening of the optimal solution … Read more
In the quadratic traveling salesman problem a cost is associated with any three nodes traversed in succession. This structure arises, e.g., if the succession of two edges represents energetic conformations, a change of direction or a possible change of transportation means. In the symmetric case, costs do not depend on the direction of traversal. We … Read more
A cutting-plane procedure for integer programming (IP) problems usually involves invoking a black-box procedure (such as the Gomory-Chvatal (GC) procedure) to compute a cutting-plane. In this paper, we describe an alternative paradigm of using the same cutting-plane black-box. This involves two steps. In the first step, we design an inequality cx = d + 1\} … Read more
In the context of convex mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP), we investigate how the outer approximation method and the generalized Benders decomposition method are affected when the respective NLP subproblems are solved inexactly. We show that the cuts in the corresponding master problems can be changed to incorporate the inexact residuals, still rendering equivalence and finiteness … Read more