On Mixed-Integer Optimal Control with Constrained Total Variation of the Integer Control

The combinatorial integral approximation (CIA) decomposition suggests to solve mixed-integer optimal control problems (MIOCPs) by solving one continuous nonlinear control problem and one mixed-integer linear program (MILP). Unrealistic frequent switching can be avoided by adding a constraint on the total variation to the MILP. Within this work, we present a fast heuristic way to solve … Read more

A counterexample to an exact extended formulation for the single-unit commitment problem

Recently, Guan, Pan, and Zohu presented a MIP model for the thermal single- unit commitment claiming that provides an integer feasible solution for any convex cost function. In this note we provide a counterexample to this statement and we produce evidence that the perspective function is needed for this aim. Citation Research Report 19-03, Istituto … Read more

New MINLP Formulations for the Unit Commitment Problems with Ramping Constraints

The Unit Commitment (UC) problem in electrical power production requires to optimally operate a set of power generation units over a short time horizon (one day to a week). Operational constraints of each unit depend on its type (e.g., thermal, hydro, nuclear, …), and can be rather complex. For thermal units, typical ones concern minimum … Read more

Experimental operation of a solar-driven climate system with thermal energy storages using mixed-integer nonlinear MPC

This work presents the results of experimental operation of a solar-driven climate system using mixed-integer nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC). The system is installed in a university building and consists of two solar thermal collector fields, an adsorption cooling machine with different operation modes, a stratified hot water storage with multiple inlets and outlets as … Read more

Template-based Minor Embedding for Adiabatic Quantum Optimization

Quantum Annealing (QA) can be used to quickly obtain near-optimal solutions for Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problems. In QA hardware, each decision variable of a QUBO should be mapped to one or more adjacent qubits in such a way that pairs of variables defining a quadratic term in the objective function are mapped to … Read more

Stochastic Discrete First-order Algorithm for Feature Subset Selection

This paper addresses the problem of selecting a significant subset of candidate features to use for multiple linear regression. Bertsimas et al. (2016) recently proposed the discrete first-order (DFO) algorithm to efficiently find near-optimal solutions to this problem. However, this algorithm is unable to escape from locally optimal solutions. To resolve this, we propose a … Read more

A geometric way to build strong mixed-integer programming formulations

We give an explicit geometric way to build mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulations for unions of polyhedra. The construction is simply described in terms of spanning hyperplanes in an r-dimensional linear space. The resulting MIP formulation is ideal, and uses exactly r integer variables and 2 x (# of spanning hyperplanes) general inequality constraints. We use … Read more

Joint chance-constrained programs and the intersection of mixing sets through a submodularity lens

A particularly important substructure in modeling joint linear chance-constrained programs with random right-hand sides and finite sample space is the intersection of mixing sets with common binary variables (and possibly a knapsack constraint). In this paper, we first revisit basic mixing sets by establishing a strong and previously unrecognized connection to submodularity. In particular, we … Read more

Assessing the Effectiveness of (Parallel) Branch-and-bound Algorithms

Empirical studies are fundamental in assessing the effectiveness of implementations of branch-and-bound algorithms. The complexity of such implementations makes empirical study difficult for a wide variety of reasons. Various attempts have been made to develop and codify a set of standard techniques for the assessment of optimization algorithms and their software implementations; however, most previous … Read more

Integer linear programming formulations for the minimum connectivity inference problem and model reduction principles

The minimum connectivity inference (MCI) problem represents an NP-hard generalization of the well-known minimum spanning tree problem. Given a set of vertices and a finite collection of subsets (of this vertex set), the MCI problem requires to find an edge set of minimal cardinality so that the vertices of each subset are connected. Although the … Read more