A two-stage optimization approach for selecting electric-flight airports

The decarbonization of short-haul air transport has gained increasing attention, with electric aircraft emerging as a promising alternative to conventional short-haul aviation. However, given the substantial investment anticipated for the necessary infrastructure, a strategic and globally coordinated selection of airports is imperative. The aim of this paper is to address this problem and determine the … Read more

Optimal personnel scheduling in hospital pharmacies considering management and operators priorities

In this paper, we address the problem of allocating and scheduling employees for work shifts in the pharmacy sector of a private hospital. To tackle this issue, we introduce the pharmacy staff scheduling problem (PSSP) in the literature. To solve the problem, we propose a mixed-integer programming formulation that considers various aspects, such as the … Read more

Pareto Leap: An Algorithm for Biobjective Mixed-Integer Programming

Many real-life optimization problems need to make decisions with discrete variables and multiple, conflicting objectives. Due to this need, the ability to solve such problems is an important and active area of research. We present a new algorithm, called Pareto Leap, for identifying the (weak) Pareto slices of biobjective mixed-integer programs (BOMIPs), even when Pareto … Read more

Risk-Averse Antibiotics Time Machine Problem

Antibiotic resistance, which is a serious healthcare issue, emerges due to uncontrolled and repeated antibiotic use that causes bacteria to mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics. The Antibiotics Time Machine Problem aims to come up with treatment plans that maximize the probability of reversing these mutations. Motivated by the severity of the problem, we develop … Read more

Proximity results in convex mixed-integer programming

We study proximity (resp. integrality gap), that is, the distance (resp. difference) between the optimal solutions (resp. optimal values) of convex integer programs (IP) and the optimal solutions (resp. optimal values) of their continuous relaxations. We show that these values can be upper bounded in terms of the recession cone of the feasible region of … Read more

Sparse Principal Component Analysis with Non-Oblivious Adversarial Perturbations

Sparse Principal Component Analysis (sparse PCA) is a fundamental dimension-reduction tool that enhances interpretability in various high-dimensional settings. An important variant of sparse PCA studies the scenario when samples are adversarially perturbed. Notably, most existing statistical studies on this variant focus on recovering the ground truth and verifying the robustness of classical algorithms when the … Read more

Generator Subadditive Functions for Mixed-Integer Programs

For equality-constrained linear mixed-integer programs (MIP) defined by rational data, it is known that the subadditive dual is a strong dual and that there exists an optimal solution of a particular form, termed generator subadditive function. Motivated by these results, we explore the connection between Lagrangian duality, subadditive duality and generator subadditive functions for general … Read more

Bounding the number and the diameter of optimal compact Black-majority districts

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) prohibits voting practices that minimize or cancel out minority voting strength. While this section provides no clear framework for avoiding minority vote dilution and creating minority-majority districts, the Supreme Court proposed the Gingles test in the 1986 case Thornberg v Gingles. The Gingles test provides three conditions … Read more

Benders decomposition with scaled cuts for multistage stochastic mixed-integer programs

We consider Benders decomposition algorithms for multistage stochastic mixed-integer programs (SMIPs) with general mixed-integer decision variables at every node in the scenario tree. We derive a hierarchy of convex polyhedral lower bounds for the value functions and expected cost to-go functions in multistage SMIPs using affine parametric cutting planes in extended spaces for the feasible … Read more

An Extended Validity Domain for Constraint Learning

We consider embedding a predictive machine-learning model within a prescriptive optimization problem. In this setting, called constraint learning, we study the concept of a validity domain, i.e., a constraint added to the feasible set, which keeps the optimization close to the training data, thus helping to ensure that the computed optimal solution exhibits less prediction … Read more