Parallel Dual Dynamic Integer Programming for Large-Scale Hydrothermal Unit-Commitment

Unit commitment has been at the center of power system operation for well over 50 years. Yet, this problem cannot be considered solved due to its size and complexity. Today, operators rely on off-the-shelf optimization solvers to tackle this challenging problem, and often resort to simplifications to make the problem more tractable and solvable in … Read more

Metaheuristic, Models and Software for the Heterogeneous Fleet Pickup and Delivery Problem with Split Loads

This paper addresses a rich variant of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) that involves pickup and delivery activities, customer time windows, heterogeneous fleet, multiple products and the possibility of splitting a customer demand among several routes. This variant generalizes traditional VRP variants by incorporating features that are commonly found in practice. We present two mixed-integer … Read more

Using an Analytical Computational-Geometry Library to Model Nonoverlap and Boundary-Distance Constraints and their Application to Packing Poly-Bézier Shapes

In this paper we will show how to model nonoverlap as well as uniform and nonuniform boundary-distance constraints between poly-Bézier shapes using an analytical computational-geometry library. We then use this capability to develop, implement and analyze analytical-optimization solutions to minimum-area rectangular-boundary packing-problems as well as minimum-area one- and two-dimensional puzzle-piece packing-problems. In the process, we … Read more

The SCIP Optimization Suite 8.0

The SCIP Optimization Suite provides a collection of software packages for mathematical optimization centered around the constraint integer programming framework SCIP. This paper discusses enhancements and extensions contained in version 8.0 of the SCIP Optimization Suite. Major updates in SCIP include improvements in symmetry handling and decomposition algorithms, new cutting planes, a new plugin type … Read more

OPM, a collection of Optimization Problems in Matlab

OPM is a small collection of CUTEst unconstrained and bound-constrained nonlinear optimization problems, which can be used in Matlab for testing optimization algorithms directly (i.e. without installing additional software). ArticleDownload View PDF

EETTlib – Energy-Efficient Train Timetabling Library

We introduce EETTlib, an instance library for the Energy-Efficient Train Timetabling problem. The task in this problem is to adjust a given timetable draft such that several key indicators relating to the energy consumption of the resulting railway traffic are minimized. These include peak power consumption, total energy consumption, loss in recuperation energy, fluctuation in … Read more

Scalable Parallel Nonlinear Optimization with PyNumero and Parapint

We describe PyNumero, an open-source, object-oriented programming framework in Python that supports rapid development of performant parallel algorithms for structured nonlinear programming problems (NLP’s) using the Message Passing Interface (MPI). PyNumero provides three fundamental building blocks for developing NLP algorithms: a fast interface for calculating first and second derivatives with the AMPL Solver Library (ASL), … Read more

RSOME in Python: An Open-Source Package for Robust Stochastic Optimization Made Easy

We develop a Python package called RSOME for modeling a wide spectrum of robust and distributionally robust optimization problems. RSOME serves as a modeling platform for formulating various optimization problems subject to distributional ambiguity in a highly readable and mathematically intuitive manner. Compared with the MATLAB version, RSOME in Python is more versatile and well … Read more

MatQapNB User Guide: A branch-and-bound program for QAPs in Matlab with the Newton-Bracketing method

MatQapNB is a MATLAB toolbox that implements a parallel branch-and-bound method using NewtBracket (the Newton bracketing method [4]) for its lower bounding procedure. It can solve small to medium scale Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) instances with dimension up to 30. MatQapNB was used in the numerical experiments on QAPs in the recent article “Solving challenging … Read more

Parallel Strategies for Direct Multisearch

Direct Multisearch (DMS) is a Derivative-free Optimization class of algorithms suited for computing approximations to the complete Pareto front of a given Multiobjective Optimization problem. It has a well-supported convergence analysis and simple implementations present a good numerical performance, both in academic test sets and in real applications. Recently, this numerical performance was improved with … Read more