Strong Duality and Minimal Representations for Cone Optimization

The elegant results for strong duality and strict complementarity for linear programming, \LP, can fail for cone programming over nonpolyhedral cones. One can have: unattained optimal values; nonzero duality gaps; and no primal-dual optimal pair that satisfies strict complementarity. This failure is tied to the nonclosure of sums of nonpolyhedral closed cones. We take a … Read more

Minimum Dissatisfaction Personnel Scheduling

In this paper we consider two problems regarding the scheduling of available personnel in order to perform a given quantity of work, which can be arbitrarily decomposed into a sequence of activities. We are interested in schedules which minimize the overall dissatisfaction, where each employee’s dissatisfaction is modeled as a time-dependent linear function. For the … Read more

Efficient Methods for Stochastic Composite Optimization

This paper considers an important class of convex programming problems whose objective function $\Psi$ is given by the summation of a smooth and non-smooth component. Further, it is assumed that the only information available for the numerical scheme to solve these problems is the subgradient of $\Psi$ contaminated by stochastic noise. Our contribution mainly consists … Read more

On the Relative Strength of Split, Triangle and Quadrilateral Cuts

Integer programs defined by two equations with two free integer variables and nonnegative continuous variables have three types of nontrivial facets: split, triangle or quadrilateral inequalities. In this paper, we compare the strength of these three families of inequalities. In particular we study how well each family approximates the integer hull. We show that, in … Read more

On the String Averaging Method for Sparse Common Fixed Points Problems

We study the common fixed points problem for the class of directed operators. This class is important because many commonly used nonlinear operators in convex optimization belong to it. We propose a definition of sparseness of a family of operators and investigate a string-averaging algorithmic scheme that favorably handles the common fixed points problem when … Read more

Branching and bounds tightening techniques for non-convex MINLP

Many industrial problems can be naturally formulated using Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP). Motivated by the demand for Open-Source solvers for real-world MINLP problems, we have developed a spatial Branch-and-Bound software package named COUENNE (Convex Over- and Under-ENvelopes for Nonlinear Estimation). In this paper, we present the structure of couenne and discuss in detail our … Read more

The N – k Problem in Power Grids: New Models, Formulations and Computation

Given a power grid modeled by a network together with equations describing the power flows, power generation and consumption, and the laws of physics, the so-called N – k problem asks whether there exists a set of k or fewer arcs whose removal will cause the system to fail. We present theoretical results and computation … Read more

Branching proofs of infeasibility in low density subset sum problems

We prove that the subset sum problem has a polynomial time computable certificate of infeasibility for all $a$ weight vectors with density at most $1/(2n)$ and for almost all integer right hand sides. The certificate is branching on a hyperplane, i.e. by a methodology dual to the one explored by Lagarias and Odlyzko; Frieze; Furst … Read more

Group sparsity via linear-time projection

We present an efficient spectral projected-gradient algorithm for optimization subject to a group one-norm constraint. Our approach is based on a novel linear-time algorithm for Euclidean projection onto the one- and group one-norm constraints. Numerical experiments on large data sets suggest that the proposed method is substantially more efficient and scalable than existing methods. CitationTechnical … Read more

An Infeasible Interior-Point Algorithm with full-Newton Step for Linear Optimization

In this paper we present an infeasible interior-point algorithm for solving linear optimization problems. This algorithm is obtained by modifying the search direction in the algorithm [C. Roos, A full-Newton step ${O}(n)$ infeasible interior-point algorithm for linear optimization, 16(4) 2006, 1110-1136.]. The analysis of our algorithm is much simpler than that of the Roos’s algorithm … Read more