Optimal Experimental Design with Routing Constraints

Data collection in application domains like agriculture and environmental science requires the deployment of sensors in large remote areas. These use cases challenge the traditional optimal experimental design (OED) formulation from statistics by their scale as well as the presence of complex operational constraints, such as that data is collected along the trajectory of a … Read more

Risk-aware Logic-based Benders Decomposition for a Location-Allocation-Pricing Problem with Stochastic Price-Sensitive Demands

We consider a capacitated location-allocation-pricing problem in a single-commodity supply chain with stochastic price-sensitive demands, where the location, allocation and pricing decisions are made simultaneously. Under a general risk measure representing an arbitrary risk tolerance policy, the problem is modeled as a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer program with a translation-invariant monotone risk measure. To solve the … Read more

On Sum-Rules for Second-Order Contingent Derivatives

We are concerned with contingent derivatives and their second-order counterparts (introduced by Ngai et al.) of set-valued mappings. Special attention is given to the development of new sum-rules for second-order contingent derivatives. To be precise, we want to find conditions under which the second-order contingent derivative of the sum of a smooth and a set-valued … Read more

Analyzing the numerical correctness of branch-and-bound decisions for mixed-integer programming

Most state-of-the-art branch-and-bound solvers for mixed-integer linear programming rely on limited-precision floating-point arithmetic and use numerical tolerances when reasoning about feasibility and optimality during their search. While the practical success of floating-point MIP solvers bears witness to their overall numerical robustness, it is well-known that numerically challenging input can lead them to produce incorrect results. … Read more

Multi-Stage Selection under Bounded Variation

We investigate a multi-stage version of the selection problem where the variation between solutions in consecutive stages is either penalized in the objective function or bounded by hard constraints. While the former problem turns out to be tractable, the complexity of the latter problem depends on the type of bounds imposed: When bounding the number … Read more

On Coupling Constraints in Pessimistic Linear Bilevel Optimization

The literature on pessimistic bilevel optimization with coupling constraints is rather scarce and it has been common sense that these problems are harder to tackle than pessimistic bilevel problems without coupling constraints. In this note, we show that this is not the case. To this end, given a pessimistic problem with coupling constraints, we derive … Read more

A new problem qualification based on approximate KKT conditions for Lipschitzian optimization with application to bilevel programming

When dealing with general Lipschitzian optimization problems, there are many problem classes where even weak constraint qualications fail at local minimizers. In contrast to a constraint qualification, a problem qualification does not only rely on the constraints but also on the objective function to guarantee that a local minimizer is a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) point. For … Read more

Relaxation methods for pessimistic bilevel optimization

We consider a smooth pessimistic bilevel optimization problem, where the lower-level problem is convex and satisfies the Slater constraint qualification. These assumptions ensure that the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) reformulation of our problem is well-defined. We then introduce and study the (i) Scholtes, (ii) Lin and Fukushima, (iii) Kadrani, Dussault and Benchakroun, (iv) Steffensen and Ulbrich, and … Read more

Spherical Support Vector Machine for Interval-Valued Data

In this work we propose a generalization of the Spherical Support Vector Machine method, in which the separator is a sphere, applied to Interval-valued data. This type of data belongs to a more general class, known as Symbolic Data, for which features are described by sets, intervals or histograms instead of classic arrays. This paradigm … Read more

Interior-point algorithms with full Newton steps for nonsymmetric convex conic optimization

We design and analyze primal-dual, feasible interior-point algorithms (IPAs) employing full Newton steps to solve convex optimization problems in standard conic form. Unlike most nonsymmetric cone programming methods, the algorithms presented in this paper require only a logarithmically homogeneous self-concordant barrier (LHSCB) of the primal cone, but compute feasible and \(\varepsilon\)-optimal solutions to both the … Read more