Near-optimal Robust Bilevel Optimization

Bilevel optimization studies problems where the optimal response to a second mathematical optimization problem is integrated in the constraints. Such structure arises in a variety of decision-making problems in areas such as market equilibria, policy design or product pricing. We introduce near-optimal robustness for bilevel problems, protecting the upper-level decision-maker from bounded rationality at the … Read more

Quantifying Double McCormick

When using the standard McCormick inequalities twice to convexify trilinear monomials, as is often the practice in modeling and software, there is a choice of which variables to group first. For the important case in which the domain is a nonnegative box, we calculate the volume of the resulting relaxation, as a function of the … Read more

Solving Mixed Integer Bilinear Problems using MILP formulations

In this paper, we examine a mixed integer linear programming (MIP) reformulation for mixed integer bilinear problems where each bilinear term involves the product of a nonnegative integer variable and a nonnegative continuous variable. This reformulation is obtained by first replacing a general integer variable with its binary expansion and then using McCormick envelopes to … Read more

On convex relaxations of quadrilinear terms

The best known method to find exact or at least epsilon-approximate solutions to polynomial programming problems is the spatial Branch-and-Bound algorithm, which rests on computing lower bounds to the value of the objective function to be minimized on each region that it explores. These lower bounds are often computed by solving convex relaxations of the … Read more

Compact linearization for bilinear mixed-integer problems

We present a compact linearization for a broad class of bilinear 0-1 mixed-integer problems subject to assignment constraints. We apply the linearization to three classes of problems: quadratic assignment, multiprocessor scheduling with communication delays, and graph partitioning, and show that it yields faster solution times. Citation DEI, Politecnico di Milano, Working paper, April 2005. Article … Read more