Verifying Integer Programming Results

Software for mixed-integer linear programming can return incorrect results for a number of reasons, one being the use of inexact floating-point arithmetic. Even solvers that employ exact arithmetic may suffer from programming or algorithmic errors, motivating the desire for a way to produce independently verifiable certificates of claimed results. Due to the complex nature of … Read more

Tackling Industrial-Scale Supply Chain Problems by Mixed-Integer Programming

SAP’s decision support systems for optimized supply network planning rely on mixed-integer programming as the core engine to compute optimal or near-optimal solutions. The modeling flexibility and the optimality guarantees provided by mixed-integer programming greatly aid the design of a robust and future-proof decision support system for a large and diverse customer base. In this … Read more

Experiments with Conflict Analysis in Mixed Integer Programming

The analysis of infeasible subproblems plays an import role in solving mixed integer programs (MIPs) and is implemented in most major MIP solvers. There are two fundamentally different concepts to generate valid global constraints from infeasible subproblems. The first is to analyze the sequence of implications obtained by domain propagation that led to infeasibility. The … Read more

Adaptive Accelerated Gradient Converging Methods under Holderian Error Bound Condition

In this paper, we focus our study on the convergence of (proximal) gradient methods and accelerated (proximal) gradient methods for smooth (composite) optimization under a H\”{o}lderian error bound (HEB) condition. We first show that proximal gradient (PG) method is automatically adaptive to HEB while accelerated proximal gradient (APG) method can be adaptive to HEB by … Read more

Characterizations of Mixed Binary Convex Quadratic Representable Sets

Representability results play a fundamental role in optimization since they provide characterizations of the feasible sets that arise from optimization problems. In this paper we study the sets that appear in the feasibility version of mixed binary convex quadratic optimization problems. We provide a complete characterization of the sets that can be obtained as the … Read more

Preconditioning PDE-constrained optimization with L^1-sparsity and control constraints

PDE-constrained optimization aims at finding optimal setups for partial differential equations so that relevant quantities are minimized. Including sparsity promoting terms in the formulation of such problems results in more practically relevant computed controls but adds more challenges to the numerical solution of these problems. The needed L^1-terms as well as additional inclusion of box … Read more

On the Existence of Pareto Solutions for Polynomial Vector Optimization Problems

We are interested in the existence of Pareto solutions to the vector optimization problem $$\text{\rm Min}_{\,\mathbb{R}^m_+} \{f(x) \,|\, x\in \mathbb{R}^n\},$$ where $f\colon\mathbb{R}^n\to \mathbb{R}^m$ is a polynomial map. By using the {\em tangency variety} of $f$ we first construct a semi-algebraic set of dimension at most $m – 1$ containing the set of Pareto values of … Read more

On the notions of facets, weak facets, and extreme functions of the Gomory-Johnson infinite group problem

We investigate three competing notions that generalize the notion of a facet of finite-dimensional polyhedra to the infinite-dimensional Gomory–Johnson model. These notions were known to coincide for continuous piecewise linear functions with rational breakpoints. We show that two of the notions, extreme functions and facets, coincide for the case of continuous piecewise linear functions, removing … Read more

Fast approximate solution of large dense linear programs

We show how random projections can be used to solve large-scale dense linear programs approximately. This is a new application of techniques which are now fairly well known in probabilistic algorithms, but have never yet been systematically applied to the fundamental class of Linear Programming. We develop the necessary theoretical framework, and show that this … Read more

A parallelizable augmented Lagrangian method applied to large-scale non-convex-constrained optimization problems

We contribute improvements to a Lagrangian dual solution approach applied to large-scale optimization problems whose objective functions are convex, continuously differentiable and possibly nonlinear, while the non-relaxed constraint set is compact but not necessarily convex. Such problems arise, for example, in the split-variable deterministic reformulation of stochastic mixed-integer optimization problems. The dual solution approach needs … Read more