Under high load, the automated dispatching of service vehicles for
the German Automobile Association (ADAC) must reoptimize a dispatch for
100{150 vehicles and 400 requests in about ten seconds to near optimality. In
the presence of service contractors, this can be achieved by the column generation
algorithm ZIBDIP. In metropolitan areas, however, service contractors
cannot be dispatched automatically because they may decline. The problem:
a model without contractors yields larger optimality gaps within ten seconds.
One way out are simplified reoptimization models. These compute a shortterm
dispatch containing only some of the requests: unknown future requests
will in
uence future service anyway. The simpler the models the better the
gaps, but also the larger the model error. What is more significant: reoptimization
gap or reoptimization model error? We answer this question in
simulations on real-world ADAC data: only the new models ShadowPrice and
ZIBDIPdummy can keep up with ZIBDIP.
In "classical optimization" it is assumed that full information about the problem to be solved is given. This, in particular, includes that all data are at hand. The real world may not be so "nice" to optimizers. Some problem constraints may not be known, the data may be corrupted, or some data may not be available at the moments when decisions have to be made. The last issue is the subject of "online optimization" which will be addressed here. We explain some theory that has been developed to cope with such situations and provide examples from practice where unavailable information is not
the result of bad data handling but an inevitable phenomenon.
Improved optimization models for potential-driven network flow problems via ASTS orientations
(2019)
The class of potential-driven network flow problems provides important models for a range of infrastructure networks. For real-world applications, they need to be combined with integer models for switching certain network elements, giving rise to hard-to-solve MINLPs. We observe that on large-scale real-world meshed networks the relaxations usu-
ally employed are rather weak due to cycles in the network. To address this situation, we introduce the concept of ASTS orientations, a generalization of bipolar orientations, as a combinatorial relaxation of feasible solutions of potential-driven flow problems, study their structure, and
show how they can be used to strengthen existing relaxations and thus provide improved optimization models. Our computational results indicate that ASTS orientations can be used to derive much stronger bounds on the flow variables than existing bound tightening methods. We also
show that our proposed model extensions yield significant performance improvements for an existing state-of-the-art MILP model for large-scale gas networks.