The Trust Region Subproblem and Semidefinite Programming

The trust region subproblem (the minimization of a quadratic objective subject to one quadratic constraint and denoted TRS) has many applications in diverse areas, e.g. function minimization, sequential quadratic programming, regularization, ridge regression, and discrete optimization. In particular, it determines the step in trust region algorithms for function minimization. Trust region algorithms are popular for … Read more

Lagrangean Duality Applied on Vehicle Routing with Time Windows

This paper presents the results of the application of a non-differentiable optimization method in connection with the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW). The VRPTW is an extension of the Vehicle Routing Problem. In the VRPTW the service at each customer must start within an associated time window. The Shortest Path decomposition of the … Read more

Lagrangian relaxation

Lagrangian relaxation is a tool to find upper bounds on a given (arbitrary) maximization problem. Sometimes, the bound is exact and an optimal solution is found. Our aim in this paper is to review this technique, the theory behind it, its numerical aspects, its relation with other techniques such as column generation. Citation in: Computational … Read more

Minimum Risk Arbitrage with Risky Financial Contracts

For a set of financial securities specified by their expected returns and variance/covariances we propose the concept of minimum risk arbitrage, characterize conditions under which such opportunities may exist. We use conic duality and convex analysis to derive these characterizations. For practical computation a decidability result on the existence of an arbitrage opportunity is derived. … Read more

A practical general approximation criterion for methods of multipliers based on Bregman distances

This paper demonstrates that for generalized methods of multipliers for convex programming based on Bregman distance kernels — including the classical quadratic method of multipliers — the minimization of the augmented Lagrangian can be truncated using a simple, generally implementable stopping criterion based only on the norms of the primal iterate and the gradient (or … Read more