Robust Optimal Aiming Strategies in Concentrated Solar Tower Power Plants

A concentrated solar tower power plant consists of a receiver mounted atop of a central tower and a field of movable mirrors called heliostats. The heliostats concentrate solar radiation onto the receiver where a fluid is heated to produce electricity in a conventional thermodynamic cycle. Aiming strategies are used to assign each heliostat to an … Read more

A relaxed interior point method for low-rank semidefinite programming problems with applications to matrix completion

A new relaxed variant of interior point method for low-rank semidefinite programming problems is proposed in this paper. The method is a step outside of the usual interior point framework. In anticipation to converging to a low-rank primal solution, a special nearly low-rank form of all primal iterates is imposed. To accommodate such a (restrictive) … Read more

Periodical Multistage Stochastic Programs

In some applications the considered multistage stochastic programs have a periodical behavior. We show that in such cases it is possible to drastically reduce the number of stages by introducing a periodical analog of the so-called Bellman equations for discounted infinite horizon problems, used in Markov Decision Processes and Stochastic Optimal Control. Furthermore, we describe … Read more

Mixed-Integer Optimal Control under Minimum Dwell Time Constraints

Tailored mixed-integer optimal control policies for real-world applications usually have to avoid very short successive changes of the active integer control. Minimum dwell time constraints express this requirement and can be included into the combinatorial integral approximation decomposition, which solves mixed-integer optimal control problems by solving one continuous nonlinear program and one mixed-integer linear program. … Read more

A smaller extended formulation for the odd cycle inequalities of the stable set polytope

For sparse graphs, the odd cycle polytope can be used to compute useful bounds for the maximum stable set problem quickly. Yannakakis introduced an extended formulation for the odd cycle inequalities of the stable set polytope in 1991, which provides a direct way to optimize over the odd cycle polytope in polynomial time, although there … Read more

Penalized stochastic gradient methods for stochastic convex optimization with expectation constraints

Stochastic gradient method and its variants are simple yet effective for minimizing an expectation function over a closed convex set. However, none of these methods are applicable to solve stochastic programs with expectation constraints, since the projection onto the feasible set is prohibitive. To deal with the expectation constrained stochastic convex optimization problems, we propose … Read more

An algorithm for optimization with disjoint linear constraints and its application for predicting rain

A specialized algorithm for quadratic optimization (QO, or, formerly, QP) with disjoint linear constraints is presented. In the considered class of problems, a subset of variables are subject to linear equality constraints, while variables in a different subset are constrained to remain in a convex set. The proposed algorithm exploits the structure by combining steps … Read more

Decentralized Online Integer Programming Problems with a Coupling Cardinality Constraint

We consider a problem involving a set of agents who need to coordinate their actions to optimize the sum of their objectives while satisfying a common resource constraint. The objective functions of the agents are unknown to them a priori and are revealed in an online manner. The resulting problem is an online optimization problem … Read more

An Average Curvature Accelerated Composite Gradient Method for Nonconvex Smooth Composite Optimization Problems

This paper presents an accelerated composite gradient (ACG) variant, referred to as the AC-ACG method, for solving nonconvex smooth composite minimization problems. As opposed to well-known ACG variants that are either based on a known Lipschitz gradient constant or a sequence of maximum observed curvatures, the current one is based on a sequence of average … Read more

Tight compact extended relaxations for nonconvex quadratic programming problems with box constraints

Cutting planes from the Boolean Quadric Polytope (BQP) can be used to reduce the optimality gap of the NP-hard nonconvex quadratic program with box constraints (BoxQP). It is known that all cuts of the Chvátal-Gomory closure of the BQP are A-odd cycle inequalities. We obtain a compact extended relaxation of all A-odd cycle inequalities, which … Read more