TY - JOUR A1 - Maher, Stephen J. T1 - A novel passenger recovery approach for the integrated airline recovery problem JF - Computers & Operations Research N2 - Schedule disruptions require airlines to intervene through the process of recovery; this involves modifications to the planned schedule, aircraft routings, crew pairings and passenger itineraries. Passenger recovery is generally considered as the final stage in this process, and hence passengers experience unnecessarily large impacts resulting from flight delays and cancellations. Most recovery approaches considering passengers involve a separately defined module within the problem formulation. However, this approach may be overly complex for recovery in many aviation and general transportation applications. This paper presents a unique description of the cancellation variables that models passenger recovery by prescribing the alternative travel arrangements for passengers in the event of flight cancellations. The results will demonstrate that this simple, but effective, passenger recovery approach significantly reduces the operational costs of the airline and increases passenger flow through the network. The integrated airline recovery problem with passenger reallocation is solved using column-and-row generation to achieve high quality solutions in short runtimes. An analysis of the column-and-row generation solution approach is performed, identifying a number of enhancement techniques to further improve the solution runtimes. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2014.11.005 VL - 57 SP - 123 EP - 137 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Hosoda, Junko A1 - Maher, Stephen J. A1 - Shinano, Yuji A1 - Villumsen, Jonas Christoffer T1 - A parallel branch-and-bound heuristic for the integrated long-haul and local vehicle routing problem on an adaptive transportation network N2 - Consolidation of commodities and coordination of vehicle routes are fundamental features of supply chain management problems. While locations for consolidation and coordination are typically known a priori, in adaptive transportation networks this is not the case. The identification of such consolidation locations forms part of the decision making process. Supply chain management problems integrating the designation of consolidation locations with the coordination of long haul and local vehicle routing is not only challenging to solve, but also very difficult to formulate mathematically. In this paper, the first mathematical model integrating location clustering with long haul and local vehicle routing is proposed. This mathematical formulation is used to develop algorithms to find high quality solutions. A novel parallel framework is developed that combines exact and heuristic methods to improve the search for high quality solutions and provide valid bounds. The results demonstrate that using exact methods to guide heuristic search is an effective approach to find high quality solutions for difficult supply chain management problems. T3 - ZIB-Report - 23-02 Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-89700 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Wu, Cheng-Lung A1 - Maher, Stephen J. T1 - Airline scheduling and disruption management T2 - L. Budd, S. Ison, eds., Air transportation management: an international perspective Y1 - 2017 SN - 9781472451064 SP - 151 EP - 167 PB - Routledge CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Maher, Stephen J. A1 - Ralphs, Ted A1 - Shinano, Yuji T1 - Assessing the Effectiveness of (Parallel) Branch-and-bound Algorithms N2 - Empirical studies are fundamental in assessing the effectiveness of implementations of branch-and-bound algorithms. The complexity of such implementations makes empirical study difficult for a wide variety of reasons. Various attempts have been made to develop and codify a set of standard techniques for the assessment of optimization algorithms and their software implementations; however, most previous work has been focused on classical sequential algorithms. Since parallel computation has become increasingly mainstream, it is necessary to re-examine and modernize these practices. In this paper, we propose a framework for assessment based on the notion that resource consumption is at the heart of what we generally refer to as the “effectiveness” of an implementation. The proposed framework carefully distinguishes between an implementation’s baseline efficiency, the efficacy with which it utilizes a fixed allocation of resources, and its scalability, a measure of how the efficiency changes as resources (typically additional computing cores) are added or removed. Efficiency is typically applied to sequential implementations, whereas scalability is applied to parallel implementations. Efficiency and scalability are both important contributors in determining the overall effectiveness of a given parallel implementation, but the goal of improved efficiency is often at odds with the goal of improved scalability. Within the proposed framework, we review the challenges to effective evaluation and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of existing methods of assessment. T3 - ZIB-Report - 19-03 Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-74702 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Gottwald, Robert Lion A1 - Maher, Stephen J. A1 - Shinano, Yuji T1 - Distributed Domain Propagation T2 - 16th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA 2017) N2 - Portfolio parallelization is an approach that runs several solver instances in parallel and terminates when one of them succeeds in solving the problem. Despite its simplicity, portfolio parallelization has been shown to perform well for modern mixed-integer programming (MIP) and boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) solvers. Domain propagation has also been shown to be a simple technique in modern MIP and SAT solvers that effectively finds additional domain reductions after the domain of a variable has been reduced. In this paper we introduce distributed domain propagation, a technique that shares bound tightenings across solvers to trigger further domain propagations. We investigate its impact in modern MIP solvers that employ portfolio parallelization. Computational experiments were conducted for two implementations of this parallelization approach. While both share global variable bounds and solutions, they communicate differently. In one implementation the communication is performed only at designated points in the solving process and in the other it is performed completely asynchronously. Computational experiments show a positive performance impact of communicating global variable bounds and provide valuable insights in communication strategies for parallel solvers. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SEA.2017.6 VL - 75 SP - 6:1 EP - 6:11 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Gottwald, Robert Lion A1 - Maher, Stephen J. A1 - Shinano, Yuji T1 - Distributed domain propagation N2 - Portfolio parallelization is an approach that runs several solver instances in parallel and terminates when one of them succeeds in solving the problem. Despite it's simplicity portfolio parallelization has been shown to perform well for modern mixed-integer programming (MIP) and boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) solvers. Domain propagation has also been shown to be a simple technique in modern MIP and SAT solvers that effectively finds additional domain reductions after a variables domain has been reduced. This paper investigates the impact of distributed domain propagation in modern MIP solvers that employ portfolio parallelization. Computational experiments were conducted for two implementations of this parallelization approach. While both share global variable bounds and solutions they communicate differently. In one implementation the communication is performed only at designated points in the solving process and in the other it is performed completely asynchronously. Computational experiments show a positive performance impact of communicating global variable bounds and provide valuable insights in communication strategies for parallel solvers. T3 - ZIB-Report - 16-71 KW - mixed integer programming KW - parallelization KW - domain propagation KW - portfolio solvers Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-61380 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bestuzheva, Ksenia A1 - Besançon, Mathieu A1 - Chen, Wei-Kun A1 - Chmiela, Antonia A1 - Donkiewicz, Tim A1 - Doornmalen, Jasper A1 - Eifler, Leon A1 - Gaul, Oliver A1 - Gamrath, Gerald A1 - Gleixner, Ambros A1 - Gottwald, Leona A1 - Graczyk, Christoph A1 - Halbig, Katrin A1 - Hoen, Alexander A1 - Hojny, Christopher A1 - Hulst, Rolf A1 - Koch, Thorsten A1 - Lübbecke, Marco A1 - Maher, Stephen J. A1 - Matter, Frederic A1 - Mühmer, Erik A1 - Müller, Benjamin A1 - Pfetsch, Marc A1 - Rehfeldt, Daniel A1 - Schlein, Steffan A1 - Schlösser, Franziska A1 - Serrano, Felipe A1 - Shinano, Yuji A1 - Sofranac, Boro A1 - Turner, Mark A1 - Vigerske, Stefan A1 - Wegscheider, Fabian A1 - Wellner, Philipp A1 - Weninger, Dieter A1 - Witzig, Jakob T1 - Enabling research through the SCIP optimization suite 8.0 JF - ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software N2 - The SCIP Optimization Suite provides a collection of software packages for mathematical optimization centered around the constraint integer programming framework SCIP. The focus of this article is on the role of the SCIP Optimization Suite in supporting research. SCIP’s main design principles are discussed, followed by a presentation of the latest performance improvements and developments in version 8.0, which serve both as examples of SCIP’s application as a research tool and as a platform for further developments. Furthermore, this article gives an overview of interfaces to other programming and modeling languages, new features that expand the possibilities for user interaction with the framework, and the latest developments in several extensions built upon SCIP. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3585516 VL - 49 IS - 2 SP - 1 EP - 21 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Gleixner, Ambros A1 - Maher, Stephen J. A1 - Müller, Benjamin A1 - Pedroso, João Pedro T1 - Exact Methods for Recursive Circle Packing N2 - Packing rings into a minimum number of rectangles is an optimization problem which appears naturally in the logistics operations of the tube industry. It encompasses two major difficulties, namely the positioning of rings in rectangles and the recursive packing of rings into other rings. This problem is known as the Recursive Circle Packing Problem (RCPP). We present the first dedicated method for solving RCPP that provides strong dual bounds based on an exact Dantzig–Wolfe reformulation of a nonconvex mixed-integer nonlinear programming formulation. The key idea of this reformulation is to break symmetry on each recursion level by enumerating one-level packings, i.e., packings of circles into other circles, and by dynamically generating packings of circles into rectangles. We use column generation techniques to design a “price-and-verify” algorithm that solves this reformulation to global optimality. Extensive computational experiments on a large test set show that our method not only computes tight dual bounds, but often produces primal solutions better than those computed by heuristics from the literature. T3 - ZIB-Report - 17-07 Y1 - 2017 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-62039 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Hosoda, Junko A1 - Maher, Stephen J. A1 - Shinano, Yuji A1 - Villumsen, Jonas Christoffer T1 - Location, transshipment and routing: An adaptive transportation network integrating long-haul and local vehicle routing N2 - The routing of commodities is a tactical problem in supply chain management that aims to synchronise transportation services connecting a network of warehouses and consolidation locations. This paper considers the routing of commodities in a transportation network that is flexible in response to demand through changes to regional warehouse clustering and the designation of consolidation locations. Traditionally, warehouse clustering and consolidation locations are determined as part of strategic planning that is performed months to years in advance of operations---limiting the flexibility in transportation networks to respond to changes in demand. A mathematical programming-based algorithmic framework is proposed to integrate the strategic decisions of location planning with tactical decisions of vehicle routing and synchronisation. A multi-armed bandit problem is developed to explore warehouse clustering decisions and exploit those that lead to small transportation costs. An extensive computational study will show that the proposed algorithmic framework effectively integrates strategic and tactical planning decisions to reduce the overall transportation costs. T3 - ZIB-Report - 21-12 Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-83438 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Maher, Stephen J. A1 - Miltenberger, Matthias A1 - Pedroso, João Pedro A1 - Rehfeldt, Daniel A1 - Schwarz, Robert A1 - Serrano, Felipe T1 - PySCIPOpt: Mathematical Programming in Python with the SCIP Optimization Suite N2 - SCIP is a solver for a wide variety of mathematical optimization problems. It is written in C and extendable due to its plug-in based design. However, dealing with all C specifics when extending SCIP can be detrimental to development and testing of new ideas. This paper attempts to provide a remedy by introducing PySCIPOpt, a Python interface to SCIP that enables users to write new SCIP code entirely in Python. We demonstrate how to intuitively model mixed-integer linear and quadratic optimization problems and moreover provide examples on how new Python plug-ins can be added to SCIP. T3 - ZIB-Report - 16-64 KW - SCIP, Mathematical optimization, Python, Modeling Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-61348 SN - 1438-0064 ER -