An aggressive reduction scheme for the simple plant location problem

Pisinger et al. introduced the concept of `aggressive reduction’ for large-scale combinatorial optimisation problems. The idea is to spend much time and effort in reducing the size of the instance, in the hope that the reduced instance will then be small enough to be solved by an exact algorithm. We present an aggressive reduction scheme … Read more

Branch-and-Price Guided Search for Integer Programs with an Application to the Multicommodity Fixed Charge Network Flow Problem

We develop an exact algorithm for integer programs that uses restrictions of the problem to produce high-quality solutions quickly. Column generation is used both for generating these problem restrictions and for producing bounds on the value of the optimal solution. The performance of the algorithm is greatly enhanced by using structure, such as arises in … Read more

D-ADMM: A Communication-Efficient Distributed Algorithm For Separable Optimization

We propose a distributed algorithm, named D-ADMM, for solving separable optimization problems in networks of interconnected nodes or agents. In a separable optimization problem, the cost function is the sum of all the agents’ private cost functions, and the constraint set is the intersection of all the agents’ private constraint sets. We require the private … Read more

Reformulation of a model for hierarchical divisive graph modularity maximization

Finding clusters, or communities, in a graph, or network is a very important problem which arises in many domains. Several models were proposed for its solution. One of the most studied and exploited is the maximization of the so called modularity, which represents the sum over all communities of the fraction of edges within these … Read more

Optimal Response to Epidemics and Cyber Attacks in Networks

This paper introduces novel formulations for optimally responding to epidemics and cyber attacks in networks. In our models, at a given time period, network nodes (e.g., users or computing resources) are associated with probabilities of being infected, and each network edge is associated with some probability of propagating the infection. A decision maker would like … Read more

Separable Concave Optimization Approximately Equals Piecewise-Linear Optimization

We study the problem of minimizing a nonnegative separable concave function over a compact feasible set. We approximate this problem to within a factor of 1+epsilon by a piecewise-linear minimization problem over the same feasible set. Our main result is that when the feasible set is a polyhedron, the number of resulting pieces is polynomial … Read more

A Security Framework for Smart Metering with Multiple Data Consumers

The increasing diffusion of Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) has raised many concerns about the protection of personal data related to energy, water or gas consumption, from which details about the habits of the users can be inferred. On the other hand, aggregated measurements about consumption are crucial for several goals, including resource provisioning, forecasting, and … Read more

Global optimization of pipe networks by the interval analysis approach: the Belgium network case

We show that global optimization techniques, based on interval analysis and constraint propagation, succeed in solving the classical problem of optimization of the Belgium gas network. CitationPublished as Inria Research report RR-7796, November 2011.ArticleDownload View PDF

Complexity and Exact Solution Approaches to the Minimum Changeover Cost Arborescence Problem

We are given a digraph G = (N, A), where each arc is colored with one among k given colors. We look for a spanning arborescence T of G rooted at a given node and having minimum changeover cost. We call this the Minimum Changeover Cost Arborescence problem. To the authors’ knowledge, it is a … Read more

A comparison of routing sets for robust network design

Designing a network able to route a set of non-simultaneous demand vectors is an important problem arising in telecommunications. The problem can be seen a two-stage robust program where the recourse function consists in choosing the routing for each demand vector. Allowing the routing to change arbitrarily as the demand varies yields a very difficult … Read more