Inefficiency of pure Nash equilibria in network congestion games: the impact of symmetry and graph structure

We study the inefficiency of pure Nash equilibria in symmetric unweighted network congestion games. We first explore the impact of symmetry on the worst-case PoA of network congestion games. For polynomial delay functions with highest degree p, we construct a family of symmetric congestion games over arbitrary networks which achieves the same worst-case PoA of … Read more

A Column Generation Approach for the Lexicographic Optimization of Intra-Hospital Transports

Over the last fewyears, the efficient design of processes in hospitals and medical facilities has received more and more attention, particularly when the improvement of the processes is aimed at relieving theworkload of medical staff. To this end,we have developed a method to determine optimal allocations of intra-hospital transports to hospital transport employees. When optimizing … Read more

A Test Instance Generator for Multiobjective Mixed-integer Optimization

Application problems can often not be solved adequately by numerical algorithms as several difficulties might arise at the same time. When developing and improving algorithms which hopefully allow to handle those difficulties in the future, good test instances are required. These can then be used to detect the strengths and weaknesses of different algorithmic approaches. … Read more

A Sequential Quadratic Programming Method for Optimization with Stochastic Objective Functions, Deterministic Inequality Constraints and Robust Subproblems

In this paper, a robust sequential quadratic programming method of Burke and Han (Math Programming, 1989)  for constrained optimization is generalized to problem with stochastic objective function, deterministic equality and inequality constraints. A stochastic line search scheme in Paquette and Scheinberg (SIOPT, 2020) is employed to globalize the steps. We show that in the case … Read more

Bilevel optimization with a multi-objective lower-level problem: Risk-neutral and risk-averse formulations

In this work, we propose different formulations and gradient-based algorithms for deterministic and stochastic bilevel problems with conflicting objectives in the lower level. Such problems have received little attention in the deterministic case and have never been studied from a stochastic approximation viewpoint despite the recent advances in stochastic methods for single-level, bilevel, and multi-objective … Read more

Efficient Discovery of Cost-effective Policies in Sequential, Medical Decision-Making Problems

Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is extensively employed by healthcare policymakers to guide funding decisions and inform optimal design of medical interventions. In the CEA literature, willingness to pay (WTP) serves as a common metric for converting health benefits into monetary value and defining the net monetary benefit of an intervention. However, there is no universally accepted … Read more

Generating balanced workload allocations in hospitals

As pressure on healthcare systems continues to increase, it is becoming more and more important for hospitals to properly manage the high workload levels of their staff. Ensuring a balanced workload allocation between various groups of employees in a hospital has been shown to contribute considerably towards creating sustainable working conditions. However, allocating work to … Read more

The min-Knapsack Problem with Compactness Constraints and Applications in Statistics

In the min-Knapsack problem, one is given a set of items, each having a certain cost and weight. The objective is to select a subset with minimum cost, such that the sum of the weights is not smaller than a given constant. In this paper we introduce an extension of the min-Knapsack problem with additional … Read more

Set-based Robust Optimization of Uncertain Multiobjective Problems via Epigraphical Reformulations

In this paper, we study a method for finding robust solutions to multiobjective optimization problems under uncertainty. We follow the set-based minmax approach for handling the uncertainties which leads to a certain set optimization problem with the strict upper type set relation. We introduce, under some assumptions, a reformulation using instead the strict lower type … Read more

Transportation and Inventory Planning in Serial Supply Chain with Heterogeneous Capacitated Vehicles

We study serial supply chain problems where a product is transported from a supplier to a warehouse (inbound transportation), and then from the warehouse (outbound transportation) to a retailer such that demand for a given planning horizon is satisfied. We consider heterogeneous vehicles of varying capacities for the transportation in each time period, and the … Read more