On the Rational Polytopes with Chvatal Rank 1

We study the following problem: given a rational polytope with Chvatal rank 1, does it contain an integer point? Boyd and Pulleyblank observed that this problem is in the complexity class NP ∩ co-NP, an indication that it is probably not NP-complete. It is open whether there is a polynomial time algorithm to solve the … Read more

On the NP-hardness of deciding emptiness of the split closure of a rational polytope in the 0,1 hypercube

Split cuts are prominent general-purpose cutting planes in integer programming. The split closure of a rational polyhedron is what is obtained after intersecting the half-spaces defined by all the split cuts for the polyhedron. In this paper, we prove that deciding whether the split closure of a rational polytope is empty is NP-hard, even when … Read more

Provably High-Quality Solutions for the Meal Delivery Routing Problem

Online restaurant aggregators with integrated meal delivery networks have become more common and more popular in the past few years. Meal delivery is arguably the ultimate challenge in last mile logistics: a typical order is expected to be delivered within an hour (much less if possible), and within minutes of the food becoming ready. We … Read more

Layered graph approaches for combinatorial optimization problems

Extending the concept of time-space networks, layered graphs associate information about one or multiple resource state values with nodes and arcs. While integer programming formulations based on them allow to model complex problems comparably easy, their large size makes them hard to solve for non-trivial instances. We detail and classify layered graph modeling techniques that … Read more

Can cut generating functions be good and efficient?

Making cut generating functions (CGFs) computationally viable is a central question in modern integer programming research. One would like to nd CGFs that are simultaneously good, i.e., there are good guarantees for the cutting planes they generate, and ecient, meaning that the values of the CGFs can be computed cheaply (with procedures that have some … Read more

Optimal Decision Trees for Categorical Data via Integer Programming

Decision trees have been a very popular class of predictive models for decades due to their interpretability and good performance on categorical features. However, they are not always robust and tend to overfit the data. Additionally, if allowed to grow large, they lose interpretability. In this paper, we present a novel mixed integer programming formulation … Read more

Optimal cutting planes from the group relaxations

We study quantitative criteria for evaluating the strength of valid inequalities for Gomory and Johnson’s finite and infinite group models and we describe the valid inequalities that are optimal for these criteria. We justify and focus on the criterion of maximizing the volume of the nonnegative orthant cut off by a valid inequality. For the … Read more

Approximation of Minimal Functions by Extreme Functions

In a recent paper, Basu, Hildebrand, and Molinaro established that the set of continuous minimal functions for the 1-dimensional Gomory-Johnson infinite group relaxation possesses a dense subset of extreme functions. The n-dimensional version of this result was left as an open question. In the present paper, we settle this query in the affirmative: for any … Read more

Lower bounds on the lattice-free rank for packing and covering integer programs

In this paper, we present lower bounds on the rank of the split closure, the multi-branch closure and the lattice-free closure for packing sets as a function of the integrality gap. We also provide a similar lower bound on the split rank of covering polyhedra. These results indicate that whenever the integrality gap is high, … Read more

A Criterion Space Search Algorithm for Biobjective Mixed Integer Programming: the Boxed Line Method

Despite recent interest in multiobjective integer programming, few algorithms exist for solving biobjective mixed integer programs. We present such an algorithm: the Boxed Line Method. For one of its variants, we prove that the number of single-objective integer programs solved is bounded by a linear function of the number of nondominated line segments in the … Read more