Valid inequalities and Branch-and-Cut for the Clique Pricing Problem

Motivated by an application in highway pricing, we consider the problem that consists in setting profit-maximizing tolls on a clique subset of a multicommodity transportation network. Following a proof that clique pricing is NP-hard, we propose strong valid inequalities, some of which define facets of the 2-commodity polyhedron. The numerical efficiency of these inequalities is … Read more

Constrained Infinite Group Relaxations of MIPs

Recently minimal and extreme inequalities for continuous group relaxations of general mixed integer sets have been characterized. In this paper, we consider a stronger relaxation of general mixed integer sets by allowing constraints, such as bounds, on the free integer variables in the continuous group relaxation. We generalize a number of results for the continuous … Read more

Cutting Plane Methods and Subgradient Methods

Interior point methods have proven very successful at solving linear programming problems. When an explicit linear programming formulation is either not available or is too large to employ directly, a column generation approach can be used. Examples of column generation approaches include cutting plane methods for integer programming and decomposition methods for many classes of … Read more

Strengthening lattice-free cuts using non-negativity

In recent years there has been growing interest in generating valid inequalities for mixed-integer programs using sets with 2 or more constraints. In particular, Andersen et.al (2007) and Borozan and Cornue’jols (2007) study sets defined by equations that contain exactly one integer variable per row. The integer variables are not restricted in sign. Cutting planes … Read more

On convex relaxations of quadrilinear terms

The best known method to find exact or at least epsilon-approximate solutions to polynomial programming problems is the spatial Branch-and-Bound algorithm, which rests on computing lower bounds to the value of the objective function to be minimized on each region that it explores. These lower bounds are often computed by solving convex relaxations of the … Read more

Optimal Security Response to Attacks on Open Science Grids

Cybersecurity is a growing concern, especially in open grids, where attack propagation is easy because of prevalent collaborations among thousands of users and hundreds of institutions. The collaboration rules that typically govern large science experiments as well as social networks of scientists span across the institutional security boundaries. A common concern is that the increased … Read more

Stochastic binary problems with simple penalties for capacity constraints violations

This paper studies stochastic programs with first-stage binary variables and capacity constraints, using simple penalties for capacities violations. In particular, we take a closer look at the knapsack problem with weights and capacity following independent random variables and prove that the problem is weakly \NP-hard in general. We provide pseudo-polynomial algorithms for three special cases … Read more

Information-Based Branching Schemes for Binary Linear Mixed Integer Problems

Branching variable selection can greatly a ffect the eff ectiveness and efficiency of a branch-and- bound algorithm. Traditional approaches to branching variable selection rely on estimating the eff ect of the candidate variables on the objective function. We propose an approach which is empowered by exploiting the information contained in a family of fathomed subproblems, collected beforehand from … Read more

The Multidimensional Knapsack Problem: Structure and Algorithms

We study the multidimensional knapsack problem, present some theoretical and empirical results about its structure, and evaluate different Integer Linear Programming (ILP) based, metaheuristic, and collaborative approaches for it. We start by considering the distances between optimal solutions to the LP-relaxation and the original problem and then introduce a new core concept for the MKP, … Read more

On Mixing Sets Arising in Chance-Constrained Programming

The mixing set with a knapsack constraint arises in deterministic equivalent of probabilistic programming problems with finite discrete distributions. We first consider the case that the probabilistic program has equal probabilities for each scenario. We study the resulting mixing set with a cardinality constraint and propose facet-defining inequalities that subsume known explicit inequalities for this … Read more