Symmetry in integer programs (IPs) can be exploited in order to reduce solving times. Usually only symmetries of the original IP are handled, but new symmetries may arise at some nodes of the branch-and-bound tree. While symmetry-handling inequalities (SHIs) can easily be used to handle original symmetries, handling sub-symmetries arising later on is more intricate. … Read more
Handling symmetries in optimization problems is essential for devising efficient solution methods. In this article, we present a general framework that captures many of the already existing symmetry handling methods. While these methods are mostly discussed independently from each other, our framework allows to apply different methods simultaneously and thus outperforming their individual effect. Moreover, … Read more
During the last decades, the use of advanced optimization algorithms to generate sports timetables has caught the attention of both academics and practitioners. From a managerial standpoint, the competition’s structure and the design of the league’s schedule represent key strategic decisions with a direct impact in terms of revenue and other important indicators. Argentina’s National … Read more
Round robin tournaments are omnipresent in sport competitions and beyond. We propose two new integer programming formulations for scheduling a round robin tournament, one of which we call the matching formulation. We analytically compare their linear relaxations with the linear relaxation of a well-known traditional formulation. We find that the matching formulation is stronger than … Read more
Multiobjective integer programs (MOIPs) simultaneously optimize multiple objective functions over a set of linear constraints and integer variables. In this paper, we present continuous, convex hull and Lagrangian relaxations for MOIPs and examine the relationship among them. The convex hull relaxation is tight at supported solutions, i.e., those that can be derived via a weighted-sum … Read more
Motivated by applications in cloud computing, we study a temporal bin packing problem with jobs that occupy half of a bin’s capacity. An instance is given by a set of jobs, each with a start and end time during which it must be processed, i.e., assigned to a bin. A bin can accommodate two jobs … Read more
Motivated by the importance of social resilience as a crucial element in cascading leaving of users from a social network, we study identifying a largest relaxed variant of a degree-based cohesive subgraph: the maximum anchored k-core problem. Given graph G=(V,E) and integers k and b, the maximum anchored k-core problem seeks to find a largest … Read more
We consider a problem from the context of energy-efficient underground railway timetabling, in which an existing timetable draft is improved by slightly changing departure and running times. In practice, synchronization between accelerating and braking trains to utilize regenerative braking plays a major role for the energy-efficiency of a timetable. Since deviations from a planned timetable … Read more
We consider the two-bar charts packing (2-BCPP), a recent combinatorial optimization problem whose aim is to pack a set of one-dimensional items into the minimum number of bins. As opposed to the well-known bin packing problem, pairs of items are grouped to form bar charts, and a solution is only feasible if the first and … Read more
While most methods for solving mixed-integer optimization problems compute a single optimal solution, a diverse set of near-optimal solutions can often lead to improved outcomes. We present a new method for finding a set of diverse solutions by emphasizing diversity within the search for near-optimal solutions. Specifically, within a branch-and-bound framework, we investigated parameterized node … Read more