The recoverable robust tail assignment problem

Schedule disruptions are commonplace in the airline industry with many flight-delaying events occurring each day. Recently there has been a focus on introducing robustness into airline planning stages to reduce the effect of these disruptions. We propose a recoverable robustness technique as an alternative to robust optimisation to reduce the effect of disruptions and the … Read more

Optimizing Trading Decisions for Hydro Storage Systems using Approximate Dual Dynamic Programming

We propose a new approach to optimize operations of hydro storage systems with multiple connected reservoirs which participate in wholesale electricity markets. Our formulation integrates short-term intraday with long-term interday decisions. The intraday problem considers bidding decisions as well as storage operation during the day and is formulated as a stochastic program. The interday problem … Read more

Robust and Trend-following Student’s t Kalman Smoothers

Two nonlinear Kalman smoothers are proposed using the Student’s t distribution. The first, which we call the T-Robust smoother, finds the maximum a posteriori (MAP) solution for Gaussian process noise and Student’s t observation noise. It is extremely robust against outliers, outperforming the recently proposed L1-Laplace smoother in extreme situations with data containing 20% or … Read more

A Family of Newton Methods for Nonsmooth Constrained Systems with Nonisolated Solutions

We propose a new family of Newton-type methods for the solution of constrained systems of equations. Under suitable conditions, that do not include differentiability or local uniqueness of solutions, local, quadratic convergence to a solution of the system of equations can be established. We show that as particular instances of the method we obtain inexact … Read more

A randomized Mirror-Prox method for solving structured large-scale matrix saddle-point problems

In this paper, we derive a randomized version of the Mirror-Prox method for solving some structured matrix saddle-point problems, such as the maximal eigenvalue minimization problem. Deterministic first-order schemes, such as Nesterov’s Smoothing Techniques or standard Mirror-Prox methods, require the exact computation of a matrix exponential at every iteration, limiting the size of the problems … Read more

Hedge algorithm and Dual Averaging schemes

We show that the Hedge algorithm, a method that is widely used in Machine Learning, can be interpreted as a particular instance of Dual Averaging schemes, which have recently been introduced by Nesterov for regret minimization. Based on this interpretation, we establish three alternative methods of the Hedge algorithm: one in the form of the … Read more

A branch and bound algorithm for the global optimization of Hessian Lipschitz continuous functions

We present a branch and bound algorithm for the global optimization of a twice differentiable nonconvex objective function with a Lipschitz continuous Hessian over a compact, convex set. The algorithm is based on applying cubic regularisation techniques to the objective function within an overlapping branch and bound algorithm for convex constrained global optimization. Unlike other … Read more

A Security Framework for Smart Metering with Multiple Data Consumers

The increasing diffusion of Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) has raised many concerns about the protection of personal data related to energy, water or gas consumption, from which details about the habits of the users can be inferred. On the other hand, aggregated measurements about consumption are crucial for several goals, including resource provisioning, forecasting, and … Read more

A new family of high order directions for unconstrained optimization inspired by Chebyshev and Shamanskii methods

The 1669-1670 Newton-Raphson’s method is still used to solve equations systems and unconstrained optimization problems. Since this method, some other algorithms inspired by Newton’s have been proposed: in 1839 Chebyshev developped a high order cubical convergence algorithm, and in 1967 Shamanskii proposed an acceleration of Newton’s method. By considering a Newton-type methods as displacement directions, … Read more

On the Difficulty of Deciding Asymptotic Stability of Cubic Homogeneous Vector Fields

It is well-known that asymptotic stability (AS) of homogeneous polynomial vector fields of degree one (i.e., linear systems) can be decided in polynomial time e.g. by searching for a quadratic Lyapunov function. Since homogeneous vector fields of even degree can never be AS, the next interesting degree to consider is equal to three. In this … Read more