Exploiting Partial Convexity of Pump Characteristics in Water Network Design

The design of water networks consists of selecting pipe connections and pumps to ensure a given water demand to minimize investment and operating costs. Of particular importance is the modeling of variable speed pumps, which are usually represented by degree two and three polynomials approximating the characteristic diagrams. In total, this yields complex mixed-integer (non-convex) … Read more

Optimization and Validation of Pumping System Design and Operation for Water Supply in High-Rise Buildings

The application of mathematical optimization methods provides the capacity to increase the energy efficiency and to lower the investment costs of technical systems, considerably. We present a system approach for the optimization of the design and operation of pumping systems and exemplify it by applying it to the water supply of high-rise buildings. The underlying … Read more

A counterexample to an exact extended formulation for the single-unit commitment problem

Recently, Guan, Pan, and Zohu presented a MIP model for the thermal single- unit commitment claiming that provides an integer feasible solution for any convex cost function. In this note we provide a counterexample to this statement and we produce evidence that the perspective function is needed for this aim. CitationResearch Report 19-03, Istituto di … Read more

Expert-Enhanced Machine Learning for Cardiac Arrhythmia Classification

We propose a new method for the classification task of distinguishing atrial Fibrillation (AFib) from regular atrial tachycardias including atrial Flutter (AFlu) on the basis of a surface electrocardiogram (ECG). Although recently many approaches for an automatic classification of cardiac arrhythmia were proposed, to our knowledge none of them can distinguish between these two. We … Read more

Experimental operation of a solar-driven climate system with thermal energy storages using mixed-integer nonlinear MPC

This work presents the results of experimental operation of a solar-driven climate system using mixed-integer nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC). The system is installed in a university building and consists of two solar thermal collector fields, an adsorption cooling machine with different operation modes, a stratified hot water storage with multiple inlets and outlets as … Read more

Solving Heated Oil Pipeline Problems Via Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming Approach

It is a crucial problem how to heat oil and save running cost for crude oil transport. This paper strictly formulates such a heated oil pipeline problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming model. Nonconvex and convex continuous relaxations of the model are proposed, which are proved to be equivalent under some suitable conditions. Meanwhile, … Read more

Visible points, the separation problem, and applications to MINLP

In this paper we introduce a technique to produce tighter cutting planes for mixed-integer non-linear programs. Usually, a cutting plane is generated to cut off a specific infeasible point. The underlying idea is to use the infeasible point to restrict the feasible region in order to obtain a tighter domain. To ensure validity, we require … Read more

A Status Report on Conflict Analysis in Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming

Mixed integer nonlinear programs (MINLPs) are arguably among the hardest optimization problems, with a wide range of applications. MINLP solvers that are based on linear relaxations and spatial branching work similar as mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers in the sense that they are based on a branch-and-cut algorithm, enhanced by various heuristics, domain propagation, and … Read more

Intersection disjunctions for reverse convex sets

We present a framework to obtain valid inequalities for optimization problems constrained by a reverse convex set, which is defined as the set of points in a polyhedron that lie outside a given open convex set. We are particularly interested in cases where the closure of the convex set is either non-polyhedral, or is defined … Read more

Intersection cuts for factorable MINLP

Given a factorable function f, we propose a procedure that constructs a concave underestimor of f that is tight at a given point. These underestimators can be used to generate intersection cuts. A peculiarity of these underestimators is that they do not rely on a bounded domain. We propose a strengthening procedure for the intersection … Read more