A Computational Study for Piecewise Linear Relaxations of Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programs

Solving mixed-integer nonlinear problems by means of piecewise linear relaxations can be a reasonable alternative to the commonly used spatial branch-and-bound. These relaxations have been modeled by various mixed-integer models in recent decades. The idea is to exploit the availability of mature solvers for mixed-integer problems. In this work, we compare different reformulations in terms … Read more

Tight Probability Bounds with Pairwise Independence

\(\) While useful probability bounds for \(n\) pairwise independent Bernoulli random variables adding up to at least an integer \(k\) have been proposed in the literature, none of these bounds are tight in general. In this paper, we provide several results in this direction. Firstly, when \(k = 1\), the tightest upper bound on the … Read more

Decision Diagrams for Discrete Optimization: A Survey of Recent Advances

In the last decade, decision diagrams (DDs) have been the basis for a large array of novel approaches for modeling and solving optimization problems. Many techniques now use DDs as a key tool to achieve state-of-the-art performance within other optimization paradigms, such as integer programming and constraint programming. This paper provides a survey of the … Read more

Robust Concave Utility Maximization over Chance Constraints

This paper first studies an expected utility problem with chance constraints and incomplete information on a decision maker’s utility function. The model maximizes the worst-case expected utility of random outcome over a set of concave functions within a novel ambiguity set, while the underlying probability distribution is known. To obtain computationally tractable formulations, we employ … Read more

Γ-counterparts for robust nonlinear combinatorial and discrete optimization

Γ-uncertainties have been introduced for adjusting the degree of conservatism ofrobust counterparts of (discrete) linear optimization problems under interval uncertainty. Thisarticle’s contribution is a generalization of this approach to (mixed-integer) nonlinear optimizationproblems. We focus on the cases in which the uncertainty is linear but also derive formulationsfor the general case. We present cases where the … Read more

Optimal switching sequence for switched linear systems

We study the following optimization problem over a dynamical system that consists of several linear subsystems: Given a finite set of n-by-n matrices and an n-dimensional vector, find a sequence of K matrices, each chosen from the given set of matrices, to maximize a convex function over the product of the K matrices and the … Read more

Distributionally Robust Linear and Discrete Optimization with Marginals

In this paper, we study the class of linear and discrete optimization problems in which the objective coefficients are chosen randomly from a distribution, and the goal is to evaluate robust bounds on the expected optimal value as well as the marginal distribution of the optimal solution. The set of joint distributions is assumed to … Read more

Network-based Approximate Linear Programming for Discrete Optimization

We develop a new class of approximate linear programs (ALPs) that project the high-dimensional value function of dynamic programs onto a class of basis functions, each defined as a network that represents aggregrations over the state space. The resulting ALP is a minimum-cost flow problem over an extended variable space that synchronizes flows across multiple … Read more

Alternating Criteria Search: A Parallel Large Neighborhood Search Algorithm for Mixed Integer Programs

We present a parallel large neighborhood search framework for finding high quality primal solutions for generic Mixed Integer Programs (MIPs). The approach simultaneously solves a large number of sub-MIPs with the dual objective of reducing infeasibility and optimizing with respect to the original objective. Both goals are achieved by solving restricted versions of two auxiliary … Read more

Robust Nonparametric Testing for Causal Inference in Observational Studies

We consider the decision problem of making causal conclusions from observational data. Typically, using standard matched pairs techniques, there is a source of uncertainty that is not usually quanti fied, namely the uncertainty due to the choice of the experimenter: two di fferent reasonable experimenters can easily have opposite results. In this work we present an alternative … Read more