We consider the Train Timetabling Problem (TTP) in a railway node (i.e. a set of stations in an urban area interconnected by tracks), which calls for determining the best schedule for a given set of trains during a given time horizon, while satisfying several track operational constraints. In particular, we consider the context of a … Read more
We introduce computable a-priori and a-posteriori error bounds for optimality and feasibility of a point generated as the rounding of an optimal point of the LP relaxation of a mixed integer linear optimization problem. Treating the mesh size of integer vectors as a parameter allows us to study the effect of different `granularities’ in the … Read more
Limited memory quasi-Newton methods and trust-region methods represent two efficient approaches used for solving unconstrained optimization problems. A straightforward combination of them deteriorates the efficiency of the former approach, especially in the case of large-scale problems. For this reason, the limited memory methods are usually combined with a line search. We show how to efficiently … Read more
Recently several methods were proposed for sparse optimization which make careful use of second-order information [11, 30, 17, 3] to improve local convergence rates. These methods construct a composite quadratic approximation using Hessian information, optimize this approximation using a first-order method, such as coordinate descent and employ a line search to ensure sufficient descent. Here … Read more
This paper develops a robust optimization based decision-making framework using a nonparametric perturbation of a reference utility function. The perturbation preserves the risk-aversion property but solves the problem of ambiguity and inconsistency in eliciting the reference utility function. We study the topology of the perturbation, and show that in the decision-making framework the price of … Read more
In this article, we present a geometric theoretical analysis of semidefinite feasibility problems (SDFPs). We introduce the concept of hyper feasible partitions and sub-hyper feasible directions, and show how they can be used to decompose SDFPs into smaller ones, in a way that preserves most feasibility properties of the original problem. With this technique, we … Read more
The Internet is currently mostly exploited as a means to perform massive digital content distribution. Such a usage profile was not specifically taken into account while initially designing the architecture of the network: as a matter of fact, the Internet was instead conceived around the concept of host-to-host communications between two remote machines. To solve … Read more
Given a telecommunication network, modeled by a graph with capacities, we are interested in comparing the behavior and usefulness of two information propagation schemes, namely multicast and network coding, when the aforementioned network is subject to single arc failure. We consider the case with a single source node and a set of terminal nodes. The … Read more
We present a novel heuristic algorithm to identify feasible solutions of a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem arising in natural gas transportation: the selection of new pipelines to enhance the network’s capacity to a desired level in a cost-efficient way. We solve this problem in a linear programming based branch-and-cut approach, where we deal with the … Read more
Finding a global solution to the optimal power flow (OPF) problem is difficult due to its nonconvexity. A convex relaxation in the form of semidefinite programming (SDP) has attracted much attention lately as it yields a global solution in several practical cases. However, it does not in all cases, and such cases have been documented … Read more