Provably High-Quality Solutions for the Meal Delivery Routing Problem

Online restaurant aggregators with integrated meal delivery networks have become more common and more popular in the past few years. Meal delivery is arguably the ultimate challenge in last mile logistics: a typical order is expected to be delivered within an hour (much less if possible), and within minutes of the food becoming ready. We … Read more

Polyhedral-based Methods for Mixed-Integer SOCP in Tree Breeding

Optimal contribution selection (OCS) is a mathematical optimization problem that aims to maximize the total benefit from selecting a group of individuals under a constraint on genetic diversity. We are specifically focused on OCS as applied to forest tree breeding, when selected individuals will contribute equally to the gene pool. Since the diversity constraint in … Read more

Strong formulations for conic quadratic optimization with indicator variables

We study the convex hull of the mixed-integer set given by a conic quadratic inequality and indicator variables. Conic quadratic terms are often used to encode uncertainties, while the indicator variables are used to model fixed costs or enforce sparsity in the solutions. We provide the convex hull description of the set under consideration when … Read more

The running intersection relaxation of the multilinear polytope

The multilinear polytope MP_G of a hypergraph G is the convex hull of a set of binary points satisfying a collection of multilinear equations. We introduce the running-intersection inequalities, a new class of facet-defining inequalities for the multilinear polytope. Accordingly, we define a new polyhedral relaxation of MP_G referred to as the running-intersection relaxation and … Read more

The Stable Set Problem: Clique and Nodal Inequalities Revisited

The stable set problem is a fundamental combinatorial optimisation problem, that is known to be very difficult in both theory and practice. Some of the solution algorithms in the literature are based on 0-1 linear programming formulations. We examine an entire family of such formulations, based on so-called clique and nodal inequalities. As well as … Read more

An Improved Flow-based Formulation and Reduction Principles for the Minimum Connectivity Inference Problem

The Minimum Connectivity Inference (MCI) problem represents an NP-hard generalisation of the well-known minimum spanning tree problem and has been studied in different fields of research independently. Let an undirected complete graph and finitely many subsets (clusters) of its vertex set be given. Then, the MCI problem is to find a minimal subset of edges … Read more

The Cost of Not Knowing Enough: Mixed-Integer Optimization with Implicit Lipschitz Nonlinearities

It is folklore knowledge that nonconvex mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problems can be notoriously hard to solve in practice. In this paper we go one step further and drop analytical properties that are usually taken for granted in mixed-integer nonlinear optimization. First, we only assume Lipschitz continuity of the nonlinear functions and additionally consider multivariate implicit … Read more

MSEA.jl: A Multi-Stage Exact Algorithm for Bi-objective Pure Integer Linear Programming in Julia

We present a new exact method for bi-objective pure integer linear programming, the so-called Multi-Stage Exact Algorithm (MSEA). The method combines several existing exact and approximate algorithms in the literature to compute the entire nondominated frontier of any bi-objective pure integer linear program. Each algorithm available in MSEA has multiple versions in the literature. Hence, … Read more

Subdeterminants and Concave Integer Quadratic Programming

We consider the NP-hard problem of minimizing a separable concave quadratic function over the integral points in a polyhedron, and we denote by D the largest absolute value of the subdeterminants of the constraint matrix. In this paper we give an algorithm that finds an epsilon-approximate solution for this problem by solving a number of … Read more

Improved Regularity Assumptions for Partial Outer Convexification of Mixed-Integer PDE-Constrained Optimization problems

Partial outer convexification is a relaxation technique for MIOCPs being constrained by time-dependent differential equations. Sum-Up-Rounding algorithms allow to approximate feasible points of the relaxed, convexified continuous problem with binary ones that are feasible up to an arbitrarily small $\delta > 0$. We show that this approximation property holds for ODEs and semilinear PDEs under … Read more