Multi-Objective Optimization for Politically Fair Districting: A Scalable Multilevel Approach

Political districting in the United States is a decennial process of redrawing the boundaries of congressional and state legislative districts. The notion of fairness in political districting has been an important topic of subjective debate, with district maps having consequences to multiple stakeholders. Even though districting as an optimization problem has been well-studied, existing models … Read more

Using two-dimensional Projections for Stronger Separation and Propagation of Bilinear Terms

One of the most fundamental ingredients in mixed-integer nonlinear programming solvers is the well- known McCormick relaxation for a product of two variables x and y over a box-constrained domain. The starting point of this paper is the fact that the convex hull of the graph of xy can be much tighter when computed over … Read more

A Decomposition Heuristic for Mixed-Integer Supply Chain Problems

Mixed-integer supply chain models typically are very large but are also very sparse and can be decomposed into loosely coupled blocks. In this paper, we use general-purpose techniques to obtain a block decomposition of supply chain instances and apply a tailored penalty alternating direction method, which exploits the structural properties of the decomposed instances. We … Read more

On the depth of cutting planes

We introduce a natural notion of depth that applies to individual cutting planes as well as entire families. This depth has nice properties that make it easy to work with theoretically, and we argue that it is a good proxy for the practical strength of cutting planes. In particular, we show that its value lies … Read more

An Enhanced Logical Benders Approach for Linear Programs with Complementarity

This work extends the ones of Hu et al. (2008) and Bai et al. (2013) of a logical Benders approach for globally solving Linear Programs with Complementarity Constraints. By interpreting the logical Benders method as a reversed branch-and-bound method, where the whole exploration procedure starts from the leaf nodes in an enumeration tree, we provide … Read more

Computing Feasible Points of Bilevel Problems with a Penalty Alternating Direction Method

Bilevel problems are highly challenging optimization problems that appear in many applications of energy market design, critical infrastructure defense, transportation, pricing, etc. Often, these bilevel models are equipped with integer decisions, which makes the problems even harder to solve. Typically, in such a setting in mathematical optimization one develops primal heuristics in order to obtain … Read more

On Electricity Market Equilibria with Storage: Modeling, Uniqueness, and a Distributed ADMM

We consider spot-market trading of electricity including storage operators as additional agents besides producers and consumers. Storages allow for shifting produced electricity from one time period to a later one. Due to this, multiple market equilibria may occur even if classical uniqueness assumptions for the case without storages are satisfied. For models containing storage operators, … Read more

Inertial Block Mirror Descent Method for Non-Convex Non-Smooth Optimization

In this paper, we propose inertial versions of block coordinate descent methods for solving non-convex non-smooth composite optimization problems. We use the general framework of Bregman distance functions to compute the proximal maps. Our method not only allows using two different extrapolation points to evaluate gradients and adding the inertial force, but also takes advantage … Read more

A Robust Optimization Approach for the Unrelated Parallel Machine Scheduling Problem

In this paper, we address the Unrelated Parallel Machine Scheduling Problem (UPMSP) with sequence- and machine-dependent setup times and job due-date constraints. Different uncertainties are typically involved in real-world production planning and scheduling problems. If ignored, they can lead to suboptimal or even infeasible schedules. To avoid this, we present two new robust optimization models … Read more

New bounds for nonconvex quadratically constrained quadratic programming

In this paper, we study some bounds for nonconvex quadratically constrained quadratic programs. Recently, Zamani has proposed a dual for linearly constrained quadratic programs, where Lagrange multipliers are affine functions. By using this method, we propose two types of bounds for quadratically constrained quadratic pro- grams, quadratic and cubic bounds. For quadratic bounds, we use … Read more