The presence of symmetry is common in certain types of scheduling problems. Symmetry can occur when one is scheduling a collection of jobs on multiple identical machines, or if one is determining production schedules for identical machines. General symmetry-breaking methods can be strengthened by taking advantage of the special structure of the symmetry group in … Read more
Computing the 1-width of the incidence matrix of a Steiner Triple System gives rise to small set covering instances that provide a computational challenge for integer programming techniques. One major source of difficulty for instances of this family is their highly symmetric structure, which impairs the performance of most branch-and-bound algorithms. The largest instance in … Read more
If a mathematical program (be it linear or nonlinear) has many symmetric optima, solving it via Branch-and-Bound techniques often yields search trees of disproportionate sizes; thus, finding and exploiting symmetries is an important task. We propose a method for automatically finding the formulation group of any given Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Program, and reformulating the problem so … Read more
We present a general theory for transforming a homogeneous conic system F: Ax = 0, x \in C, x \ne 0, to an equivalent system via projective transformation induced by the choice of a point in a related dual set. Such a projective transformation serves to pre-condition the conic system into a system that has … Read more
Given a convex body S and a point x \in S, let sym(x,S) denote the symmetry value of x in S: sym(x,S):= max{t : x + t(x – y) \in S for every y \in S}, which essentially measures how symmetric S is about the point x, and define sym(S):=\max{sym(x,S) : x \in S }. … Read more