This paper addresses the optimal design of resilient systems, in which components can fail. The system can react to failures and its behavior is described by general mixed integer nonlinear programs, which allows for applications to many (technical) systems. This then leads to a three-level optimization problem. The upper level designs the system minimizing a … Read more
The benefits of cutting planes based on the perspective function are well known for many specific classes of mixed-integer nonlinear programs with on/off structures. However, we are not aware of any empirical studies that evaluate their applicability and computational impact over large, heterogeneous test sets in general-purpose solvers. This paper provides a detailed computational study … Read more
We study a competitive facility location problem (CFLP), where two firms sequentially open new facilities within their budgets, in order to maximize their market shares of demand that follows a probabilistic choice model. This process is a Stackelberg game and admits a bilevel mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP) formulation. We derive an equivalent, single-level MINLP reformulation … Read more
In this paper we consider the problem of learning a regression function without assuming its functional form. This problem is referred to as symbolic regression. An expression tree is typically used to represent a solution function, which is determined by assigning operators and operands to the nodes. The symbolic regression problem can be formulated as … Read more
We propose an exact global solution method for bilevel mixed-integer optimization problems with lower-level integer variables and including nonlinear terms such as, \eg, products of upper-level and lower-level variables. Problems of this type are extremely challenging as a single-level reformulation suitable for off-the-shelf solvers is not available in general. In order to solve these problems … Read more
We present a solution framework for general alternating current optimal power flow (AC OPF) problems that include discrete decisions. The latter occur, for instance, in the context of the curtailment of renewables or the switching of power generation units and transmission lines. Our approach delivers globally optimal solutions and is provably convergent. We model AC … Read more
The European gas market is implemented as an entry-exit system, which aims to decouple transport and trading of gas. It has been modeled in the literature as a multilevel problem, which contains a nonlinear flow model of gas physics. Besides the multilevel structure and the nonlinear flow model, the computation of so-called technical capacities is … Read more
We investigate the generalized red refinement for n-dimensional simplices that dates back to Freudenthal in a mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP) context. We show that the red refinement meets sufficient convergence conditions for a known MINLP solution framework that is essentially based on solving piecewise linear relaxations. In addition, we prove that applying this refinement procedure … Read more
It is a challenging task to fairly compare local solvers and heuristics against each other and against global solvers. How does one weigh a faster termination time against a better quality of the found solution? In this paper, we introduce the confined primal integral, a new performance measure that rewards a balance of speed and … Read more
The class of potential-driven network flow problems provides important models for a range of infrastructure networks that lead to hard-to-solve MINLPs in real-world applications. On large-scale meshed networks the relaxations usually employed are rather weak due to cycles in the network. To address this situation, we introduce the concept of ASTS orientations, a generalization of … Read more