This paper addresses a real-life personnel scheduling problem in the context of Covid-19 pandemic, arising in a large Italian pharmaceutical distribution warehouse. In this case study, the challenge is to determine a schedule that attempts to meet the contractual working time of the employees, considering the fact that they must be divided into mutually exclusive … Read more
Spectral residual methods are derivative-free and low-cost per iteration procedures for solving nonlinear systems of equations. They are generally coupled with a nonmonotone linesearch strategy and compare well with Newton-based methods for large nonlinear systems and sequences of nonlinear systems. The residual vector is used as the search direction and choosing the steplength has a … Read more
Large logistics service providers often need to containerize and route thousands or millions of items per year. In practice, companies specify business rules of how to pack and transport items from their origin to destination. Handling and respecting those business rules manually is a complex and time-consuming task. We propose a variant of the variable … Read more
We investigate properties of some extensions of a class of Fourier-based probability metrics, originally introduced to study convergence to equilibrium for the solution to the spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation. At difference with the original one, the new Fourier-based metrics are well-defined also for probability distributions with different centers of mass, and for discrete probability measures … Read more
A stochastic adaptive regularization algorithm allowing random noise in derivatives and inexact function values is proposed for computing strong approximate minimizers of any order for inexpensively constrained smooth optimization problems. For an objective function with Lipschitz continuous p-th derivative in a convex neighbourhood of the feasible set and given an arbitrary optimality order q, it … Read more
Problem definition: Vehicle-to-grid increases the low utilization rate of privately owned electric vehicles by making their batteries available to electricity grids. We formulate a robust optimization problem that maximizes a vehicle owner’s expected profit from selling primary frequency regulation to the grid and guarantees that market commitments are met at all times for all frequency … Read more
In this paper we propose and analyze inexact and stochastic versions of the CGALP algorithm developed in the authors’ previous paper, which we denote ICGALP, that allows for errors in the computation of several important quantities. In particular this allows one to compute some gradients, proximal terms, and/or linear minimization oracles in an inexact fashion … Read more
Multiple interconnected energy production systems are a common solution to satisfy the energy demand of industrial processes. Such energy demand is usually the combination of various energy types such as heat and electricity. This implies the installation of different technologies able to produce one or multiple energy types, to satisfy all energy needs. However, multiple … Read more
Sparse principal component analysis (PCA) is a popular dimensionality reduction technique for obtaining principal components which are linear combinations of a small subset of the original features. Existing approaches cannot supply certifiably optimal principal components with more than $p=100s$ of variables. By reformulating sparse PCA as a convex mixed-integer semidefinite optimization problem, we design a … Read more
Structured optimization problems are ubiquitous in fields like data science and engineering. The goal in structured optimization is using a prescribed set of points, called atoms, to build up a solution that minimizes or maximizes a given function. In the present paper, we want to minimize a black-box function over the convex hull of a … Read more