Exact Solutions to a Carsharing Pricing and Relocation Problem under Uncertainty

In this article we study the problem of jointly deciding carsharing prices and vehicle relocations. We consider carsharing services operating in the context of multi-modal urban transportation systems. Pricing decisions take into account the availability of alternative transport modes, and customer preferences with respect to these. In order to account for the inherent uncertainty in … Read more

Non-anticipative risk-averse analysis with effective scenarios applied to long-term hydrothermal scheduling

In this paper, we deal with long-term operation planning problems of hydrothermal power systems by considering scenario analysis and risk aversion. This is a stochastic sequential decision problem whose solution must be non-anticipative, in the sense that a decision at a stage cannot use a perfect knowledge of the future. We propose strategies to reduce … Read more

An efficient solution methodology for the airport slot allocation problem with preprocessing and column generation

Airport coordination is a demand control mechanism that maximizes the use of existing infrastructure at congested airports. Aircraft operators submit a list of regular flights that they wish to operate over a five to seven-month period and a designated coordinator is responsible for allocating the available airport slots, which represent the permission to operate a … Read more

Randomized Policy Optimization for Optimal Stopping

Optimal stopping is the problem of determining when to stop a stochastic system in order to maximize reward, which is of practical importance in domains such as finance, operations management and healthcare. Existing methods for high-dimensional optimal stopping that are popular in practice produce deterministic linear policies — policies that deterministically stop based on the … Read more

Stochastic Gauss-Newton Algorithms for Online PCA

In this paper, we propose a stochastic Gauss-Newton (SGN) algorithm to study the online principal component analysis (OPCA) problem, which is formulated by using the symmetric low-rank product (SLRP) model for dominant eigenspace calculation. Compared with existing OPCA solvers, SGN is of improved robustness with respect to the varying input data and algorithm parameters. In … Read more

A Hessian inversion-free exact second order method for distributed consensus optimization

We consider a standard distributed consensus optimization problem where a set of agents connected over an undirected network minimize the sum of their individual (local) strongly convex costs. Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and Proximal Method of Multipliers (PMM) have been proved to be effective frameworks for design of exact distributed second order methods … Read more

An Asynchronous Proximal Bundle Method

We develop a fully asynchronous proximal bundle method for solving non-smooth, convex optimization problems. The algorithm can be used as a drop-in replacement for classic bundle methods, i.e., the function must be given by a first-order oracle for computing function values and subgradients. The algorithm allows for an arbitrary number of master problem processes computing … Read more

Spectral Projected Subgradient Method for Nonsmooth Convex Optimization Problems

We consider constrained optimization problems with a nonsmooth objective function in the form of mathematical expectation. The Sample Average Approximation (SAA) is used to estimate the objective function and variable sample size strategy is employed. The proposed algorithm combines an SAA subgradient with the spectral coefficient in order to provide a suitable direction which improves … Read more

A filter sequential adaptive cubic regularisation algorithm for nonlinear constrained optimization

In this paper, we propose a filter sequential adaptive regularisation algorithm using cubics (ARC) for solving nonlinear equality constrained optimization. Similar to sequential quadratic programming methods, an ARC subproblem with linearized constraints is considered to obtain a trial step in each iteration. Composite step methods and reduced Hessian methods are employed to tackle the linearized … Read more

Condensed interior-point methods: porting reduced-space approaches on GPU hardware

The interior-point method (IPM) has become the workhorse method for nonlinear programming. The performance of IPM is directly related to the linear solver employed to factorize the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) system at each iteration of the algorithm. When solving large-scale nonlinear problems, state-of-the art IPM solvers rely on efficient sparse linear solvers to solve the KKT … Read more