Computing Technical Capacities in the European Entry-Exit Gas Market is NP-Hard

As a result of its liberalization, the European gas market is organized as an entry-exit system in order to decouple the trading and transport of natural gas. Roughly summarized, the gas market organization consists of four subsequent stages. First, the transmission system operator (TSO) is obliged to allocate so-called maximal technical capacities for the nodes … Read more

Feeder Routing for Air-to-Air Refueling Operations

We consider the problem of routing a fleet of feeders for civil air-to-air refueling operations. In the air-to-air refueling problem, a fixed set of cruisers requires refueling by a fleet of feeders at fixed locations and fixed points in time. A typical objective function is to minimize the fuel consumption or the total number of … Read more

Algorithmic Results for Potential-Based Flows: Easy and Hard Cases

Potential-based flows are an extension of classical network flows in which the flow on an arc is determined by the difference of the potentials of its incident nodes. Such flows are unique and arise, for example, in energy networks. Two important algorithmic problems are to determine whether there exists a feasible flow and to maximize … Read more

A Characterization of Irreducible Infeasible Subsystems in Flow Networks

Infeasible network flow problems with supplies and demands can be characterized via violated cut-inequalities of the classical Gale-Hoffman theorem. Written as a linear program, irreducible infeasible subsystems (IISs) provide a different means of infeasibility characterization. In this article, we answer a question left open in the literature, by showing a one-to-one correspondence between IISs and … Read more

Stability of Polynomial Differential Equations: Complexity and Converse Lyapunov Questions

We consider polynomial differential equations and make a number of contributions to the questions of (i) complexity of deciding stability, (ii) existence of polynomial Lyapunov functions, and (iii) existence of sum of squares (sos) Lyapunov functions. (i) We show that deciding local or global asymptotic stability of cubic vector fields is strongly NP-hard. Simple variations … Read more

Most tensor problems are NP-hard

We show that multilinear (tensor) analogues of many efficiently computable problems in numerical linear algebra are NP-hard. Our list here includes: determining the feasibility of a system of bilinear equations, deciding whether a tensor possesses a given eigenvalue, singular value, or spectral norm; approximating an eigenvalue, eigenvector, singular vector, or spectral norm; determining a best … Read more