This is the first prize winning report for the 2012 INFORMS Railway Application Section Problem Solving Competition (https://www.informs.org/Community/RAS/Problem-Solving-Competition/2012-RAS-Problem-Solving-Competition). ArticleDownload View PDF
In this paper, we study cut generating functions for conic sets. Our first main result shows that if the conic set is bounded, then cut generating functions for integer linear programs can easily be adapted to give the integer hull of the conic integer program. Then we introduce a new class of cut generating functions … Read more
The desire of companies to offer same-day delivery leads to interesting new routing problems. We study the complexity of a setting in which a delivery to a customer is guaranteed to take place within a pre-specified time after the customer places the order. Thus, an order has a release date (when the order is placed) … Read more
The problem of identifying a specific design or architecture that allows to satisfy all the system requirements becomes more difficult when uncertainties are taken into account. When a requirement is subject to uncertainty there are a number approaches available to the system engineer, each one with its own benefits and disadvantages. Classical robust optimization is … Read more
Direct optimal control algorithms first discretize the continuous-time optimal control problem and then solve the resulting finite dimensional optimization problem. If Newton type optimization algorithms are used for solving the discretized problem, accurate first as well as second order sensitivity information needs to be computed. This article develops a novel approach for computing Hessian matrices … Read more
This paper presents a class of efficient Newton-type algorithms for solving the nonlinear programs (NLPs) arising from applying a direct collocation approach to continuous time optimal control. The idea is based on an implicit lifting technique including a condensing and expansion step, such that the structure of each subproblem corresponds to that of the multiple … Read more
The bi-objective R&S problem is a special case of the multi-objective simulation optimization problem in which two conflicting objectives are known only through dependent Monte Carlo estimators, the decision space or number of systems is finite, and each system can be sampled to some extent. The solution to the bi-objective R&S problem is a set … Read more
Representability results for mixed-integer linear systems play a fundamental role in optimization since they give geometric characterizations of the feasible sets that can be formulated by mixed-integer linear programming. We consider a natural extension of mixed-integer linear systems obtained by adding just one ellipsoidal inequality. The set of points that can be described, possibly using … Read more
In constrained nonlinear optimization, the squared slack variables can be used to transform a problem with inequality constraints into a problem containing only equality constraints. This reformulation is usually not considered in the modern literature, mainly because of possible numerical instabilities. However, this argument only concerns the development of algorithms, and nothing stops us in … Read more
In this paper, we consider the Multilinear set defined as the set of binary points satisfying a collection of multilinear equations. Such sets appear in factorable reformulations of many types of nonconvex optimization problems, including binary polynomial optimization. A great simplification in studying the facial structure of the convex hull of the Multilinear set is … Read more