Computational molecular biology has emerged as one of the most exciting interdisciplinary fields. It has currently benefited from concepts and theoretical results obtained by different scientific research communities, including genetics, biochemistry, and computer science. In the past few years it has been shown that a large number of molecular biology problems can be formulated as … Read more
In this paper, we study trilinear optimization problems with nonconvex constraints under some assumptions. We first consider the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) of the original problem. Then motivated by So \cite{So2010}, we reduce the problem to that of determining the $L_2$-diameters of certain convex bodies, which can be approximately solved in deterministic polynomial-time. After the relaxed … Read more
In this paper, we conduct a thorough study on the first and second order properties of the Moreau-Yosida regularization of the vector $k$-norm function, the indicator function of its epigraph, and the indicator function of the vector $k$-norm ball. We start with settling the vector $k$-norm case via applying the existing breakpoint searching algorithms to … Read more
We study a generalized job-shop problem called the body shop scheduling problem (bssp). This problem arises from the industrial application of welding in a car body production line, where possible collisions between industrial robots have to be taken into account. bssp corresponds to a job-shop problem where the operations of a job have to follow … Read more
We give new facets and valid inequalities for the separable piecewise linear optimization knapsack polytope. We also extend the inequalities to the case in which some of the variables are semi-continuous. In a companion paper (de Farias, Gupta, Kozyreff, Zhao, 2011) we demonstrate the efficiency of the inequalities when used as cuts in a branch-and-cut … Read more
Recently the author introduced a semidefinite upper bound on the square of the stability number of a graph, the inverse theta number, which is proved here to be multiplicative with respect to the strong graph product, hence to be an upper bound for the square of the Shannon capacity of the graph. We also describe … Read more
We report and analyze the results of our extensive computational testing of branch-and-cut for piecewise linear optimization using the cutting planes given recently by Zhao and de Farias. Besides analysis of the performance of the cuts, we also analyze the effect of formulation on the performance of branch-and-cut. Finally, we report and analyze initial results … Read more
A small polygon is a convex polygon of unit diameter. We are interested in small polygons which have the largest area for a given number of vertices $n$. Many instances are already solved in the literature, namely for all odd $n$, and for $n=4, 6$ and $8$. Thus, for even $n\geq 10$, instances of this … Read more
We consider the inverse optimization problem associated with the polynomial program $f^*=\min \{f(x):x\inK\}$ and a given current feasible solution $y\in K$. We provide a numerical scheme to compute an inverse optimal solution. That is, we compute a polynomial $\tilde{f}$ (which may be of same degree as $f$ if desired) with the following properties: (a) $y$ … Read more
In this paper we study constrained eigenvalue optimization of noncommutative (nc) polynomials, focusing on the polydisc and the ball. Our three main results are as follows: (1) an nc polynomial is nonnegative if and only if it admits a weighted sum of hermitian squares decomposition; (2) (eigenvalue) optima for nc polynomials can be computed using … Read more