The scheduling of drilling and hydraulic fracturing of wells in an unconventional oil field plays an important role in the profitability of the field. A key challenge arising in this problem is the requirement that neither drilling nor oil production can be done at wells within a specified neighborhood of a well being fractured. We … Read more
We present a general numerical solution method for control problems with PDE-defined state variables over a finite set of binary or continuous control variables. We show empirically that a naive approach that applies a numerical discretization scheme to the PDEs (and if necessary a linearization scheme) to derive constraints for a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) … Read more
Efficiently handling last-mile deliveries becomes more and more important nowadays. Using drones to support classical vehicles allows improving delivery schedules as long as efficient solution methods to plan last-mile deliveries with drones are available. We study exact solution approaches for some variants of the traveling salesman problem with drone (TSP-D) in which a truck and … Read more
The minimum connectivity inference (MCI) problem represents an NP-hard generalization of the well-known minimum spanning tree problem. Given a set of vertices and a finite collection of subsets (of this vertex set), the MCI problem requires to find an edge set of minimal cardinality so that the vertices of each subset are connected. Although the … Read more
A concentrated solar tower power plant consists of a receiver mounted atop of a central tower and a field of movable mirrors called heliostats. The heliostats concentrate solar radiation onto the receiver where a fluid is heated to produce electricity in a conventional thermodynamic cycle. Aiming strategies are used to assign each heliostat to an … Read more
Tailored mixed-integer optimal control policies for real-world applications usually have to avoid very short successive changes of the active integer control. Minimum dwell time constraints express this requirement and can be included into the combinatorial integral approximation decomposition, which solves mixed-integer optimal control problems by solving one continuous nonlinear program and one mixed-integer linear program. … Read more
In state-of-the-art mixed-integer programming solvers, a large array of reduction techniques are applied to simplify the problem and strengthen the model formulation before starting the actual branch-and-cut phase. Despite their mathematical simplicity, these methods can have significant impact on the solvability of a given problem. However, a crucial property for employing presolving techniques successfully is … Read more
When generating multi-row intersection cuts for Mixed-Integer Linear Optimization problems, an important practical question is deciding which intersection cuts to use. Even when restricted to cuts that are facet-defining for the corner relaxation, the number of potential candidates is still very large, specially for instances of large size. In this paper, we introduce a subset … Read more
A tourism company that offers fly-in safaris is faced with the challenge to route and schedule its fleet of airplanes in an optimal way. Over the course of a given time horizon several groups of tourists have to be picked up at airports and flown to their destinations within a certain time-window. Furthermore the number … Read more
A standard quadratic program is an optimization problem that consists of minimizing a (nonconvex) quadratic form over the unit simplex. We focus on reformulating a standard quadratic program as a mixed integer linear programming problem. We propose two alternative mixed integer linear programming formulations. Our first formulation is based on casting a standard quadratic program … Read more