Steepest descent drives both theory and practice of nonsmooth optimization. We study slight relaxations of two influential notions of steepest descent curves — curves of maximal slope and solutions to evolution equations. In particular, we provide a simple proof showing that lower-semicontinuous functions that are locally Lipschitz continuous on their domains — functions playing a … Read more
We show that the main results of the expected utility and dual utility theories can be derived in a unified way from two fundamental mathematical ideas: the separation principle of convex analysis, and integral representations of continuous linear functionals from functional analysis. Our analysis reveals the dual character of utility functions. We also derive new … Read more
The one-to-one relation between the points fulfilling the KKT conditions of an optimization problem and the zeros of the corresponding Kojima function is well-known. In the present paper we study the interplay between metric regularity and strong regularity of this a priori nonsmooth function in the context of semidefinite programming. Having in mind the topological … Read more
The problem of finding large complete subgraphs in bipartite graphs (that is, bicliques) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem referred to as the maximum-edge biclique problem (MBP), and has many applications, e.g., in web community discovery, biological data analysis and text mining. In this paper, we present a new continuous characterization for MBP. Given a … Read more
Joint chance constrained problems give rise to many algorithmic challenges. Even in the convex case, i.e., when an appropriate transformation of the probabilistic constraint is a convex function, its cutting-plane linearization is just an approximation, produced by an oracle providing subgradient and function values that can only be evaluated inexactly. As a result, the cutting-plane … Read more
In this paper, we propose a set of two-stage robust optimization models to design reliable p-median facility location networks subject to disruptions. A customized column-and- constraint generation approach is implemented and shown to be more effective than Benders cutting plane method. Numerical experiments are performed on real data and management insights on system design are … Read more
We propose an augmented Lagrangian algorithm for solving large-scale constrained optimization problems. The novel feature of the algorithm is an adaptive update for the penalty parameter motivated by recently proposed techniques for exact penalty methods. This adaptive updating scheme greatly improves the overall performance of the algorithm without sacrificing the strengths of the core augmented … Read more
In this work we address a game theoretic variant of the Subset Sum problem, in which two decision makers (agents/players) compete for the usage of a common resource represented by a knapsack capacity. Each agent owns a set of integer weighted items and wants to maximize the total weight of its own items included in … Read more
We report and analyze the results of our computational testing of branch-and-cut for the complementarity-constrained optimization problem (CCOP). Besides the MIP cuts commonly present in commercial optimization software, we used inequalities that explore complementarity constraints. To do so, we generalized two families of cuts proposed earlier by de Farias, Johnson, and Nemhauser that had never … Read more
In this paper we analyze the behavior of a quite standard Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm applied to the objective function transformed by means of local searches. First some surprising results are presented which concern the application of this method to standard test functions. Later we introduce an application to disk- and to sphere-packing problems, two … Read more