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

A Frank-Wolfe Based Branch-and-Bound Algorithm for Mean-Risk Optimization

We present an exact algorithm for mean-risk optimization subject to a budget constraint, where decision variables may be continuous or integer. The risk is measured by the covariance matrix and weighted by an arbitrary monotone function, which allows to model risk-aversion in a very individual way. We address this class of convex mixed-integer minimization problems … Read more

Computational investigation of simple memetic approaches for continuous global optimization

In [Locatelli et al., 2014] a memetic approach, called MDE, for the solution of continuous global optimization problems, has been introduced and proved to be quite efficient in spite of its simplicity. In this paper we computationally investigate some variants of MDE. The investigation reveals that the best variant of MDE usually outperforms MDE itself, … Read more

p-facility Huff location problem on networks

The p-facility Huff location problem aims at locating facilities on a competitive environment so as to maximize the market share. While it has been deeply studied in the field of continuous location, in this paper we study the p-facility Huff location problem on networks formulated as a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming problem that can be … Read more

Inexactness of SDP Relaxation and Valid Inequalities for Optimal Power Flow

It has been recently proven that the semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the optimal power flow problem over radial networks is exact under technical conditions such as not including generation lower bounds or allowing load over-satisfaction. In this paper, we investigate the situation where generation lower bounds are present. We show that even for a … Read more

Maximal Covering Location Problems on networks with regional demand

Covering problems are well studied in the Operations Research literature under the assumption that both the set of users and the set of potential facilities are finite. In this paper we address the following variant, which leads to a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Program (MINLP): locations of p facilities are sought along the edges of a … Read more

Global Optimization via Slack Variables

This paper presents a method for finding global optima to constrained nonlinear programs via slack variables. The method only applies if all functions involved are of class C1 but without any further qualification on the types of constraints allowed; it proceeds by reformulating the given program into a bi-objective program that is then solved for … Read more

A Feasible Active Set Method with Reoptimization for Convex Quadratic Mixed-Integer Programming

We propose a feasible active set method for convex quadratic programming problems with non-negativity constraints. This method is specifically designed to be embedded into a branch-and-bound algorithm for convex quadratic mixed integer programming problems. The branch-and-bound algorithm generalizes the approach for unconstrained convex quadratic integer programming proposed by Buchheim, Caprara and Lodi to the presence … Read more

An error analysis for polynomial optimization over the simplex based on the multivariate hypergeometric distribution

We study the minimization of fixed-degree polynomials over the simplex. This problem is well-known to be NP-hard, as it contains the maximum stable set problem in graph theory as a special case. In this paper, we consider a rational approximation by taking the minimum over the regular grid, which consists of rational points with denominator … Read more

On Global Optimization

This paper presents a relatively “unfettered” method for finding global optima to constrained nonlinear programs. The method reformulates the given program into a bi-objective mixed-integer program that is then solved for the Nash equilibrium. A numerical example (whose solution provides a new benchmark against which other algorithms may be assessed) is included to illustrate the … Read more