Conflict analysis has been successfully generalized from Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solving to mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers, but although MIP solvers operate with general linear inequalities, the conflict analysis in MIP has been limited to reasoning with the more restricted class of clausal constraint. This is in contrast to how conflict analysis is performed in … Read more
ODTLearn is an open-source Python package that provides methods for learning optimal decision trees for high-stakes predictive and prescriptive tasks based on the mixed-integer optimization (MIO) framework proposed in Aghaei et al. (2019) and several of its extensions. The current version of the package provides implementations for learning optimal classification trees, optimal fair classification trees, … Read more
We consider a robust variant of the vehicle routing problem with heterogeneous time windows (RVRP-HTW) with a focus on delay-resistant solutions. Here, customers have different availability time windows for every vehicle and must be provided with a preferably tight appointment window for the planned service. Different vehicles are a possibility to model different days on … Read more
Conflict analysis originally tried to exploit the knowledge that certain nodes in a relaxation-based branch-and-bound are infeasible. It has been extended to derive valid constraints also from feasible nodes. This paper adapts this approach to mixed-integer semidefinite programs. Using dual solutions, the primal constraints are aggregated and the resulting inequalities can be used at different … Read more
\(\) We study the problem of inferring sparse time-varying Markov random fields (MRFs) with different discrete and temporal regularizations on the parameters. Due to the intractability of discrete regularization, most approaches for solving this problem rely on the so-called maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) with relaxed regularization, which neither results in ideal statistical properties nor scale to … Read more
In this tutorial we consider single-leader-multi-follower games in which the models of the lower-level players have polyhedral feasible sets and convex objective functions. This situation allows for classic KKT reformulations of the separate lower-level problems, which lead to challenging single-level reformulations of MPCC type. The main contribution of this tutorial is to present a ready-to-use … Read more
In a series of essays, we introduce average incremental cost (AIC) pricing and present examples to help understand its advantages. In non-convex markets, AIC pricing is the rough equivalent to marginal cost pricing in convex markets. We present a qualitative comparison of current ISO pricing methods and the AIC approach. We argue that AIC better … Read more
Since the inception of ISOs, Locational Marginal Prices (LMPs) alone were not incentive compatible because an auction winner who offered its avoidable costs could lose money at the LMP. ISOs used make-whole payments to ensure market participants did not lose money. Make-whole payments were not public creating transparency issues. Over time, the ISOs employed methods … Read more
\(\) In this note, we study the size of the support of solutions to linear Diophantine equations $Ax=b, ~x\in\Z^n$ where $A\in\Z^{m\times n}, b\in\Z^n$. We give an asymptotically tight upper bound on the smallest support size, parameterized by $\|A\|_\infty$ and $m$, and taken as a worst case over all $b$ such that the above system has … Read more
We describe a method to generate cutting planes for quadratically constrained optimization problems. The method uses information from the simplex tableau of a linear relaxation of the problem in combination with McCormick estimators. The method is guaranteed to cut off a basic feasible solution of the linear relaxation that violates the quadratic constraints in the … Read more