TY - GEN A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Gleixner, Ambros A1 - Heinz, Stefan A1 - Vigerske, Stefan T1 - On the computational impact of MIQCP solver components N2 - We provide a computational study of the performance of a state-of-the-art solver for nonconvex mixed-integer quadratically constrained programs (MIQCPs). Since successful general-purpose solvers for large problem classes necessarily comprise a variety of algorithmic techniques, we focus especially on the impact of the individual solver components. The solver SCIP used for the experiments implements a branch-and-cut algorithm based on linear outer approximation to solve MIQCPs to global optimality. Our analysis is based on a set of 86 publicly available test instances. T3 - ZIB-Report - 11-01 KW - MIQCP KW - MIP KW - mixed-integer quadratically constrained programming KW - computational KW - nonconvex Y1 - 2011 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-11998 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Turner, Mark A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Besançon, Mathieu T1 - A Context-Aware Cutting Plane Selection Algorithm for Mixed-Integer Programming T2 - Operations Research Proceedings 2023. OR 2023. N2 - The current cut selection algorithm used in mixed-integer programming solvers has remained largely unchanged since its creation. In this paper, we propose a set of new cut scoring measures, cut filtering techniques, and stopping criteria, extending the current state-of-the-art algorithm and obtaining a 5\% performance improvement for SCIP over the MIPLIB 2017 benchmark set. Y1 - 2025 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-58405-3_28 SP - 217 EP - 244 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Turner, Mark A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Besançon, Mathieu A1 - Koch, Thorsten T1 - Branching via Cutting Plane Selection: Improving Hybrid Branching N2 - Cutting planes and branching are two of the most important algorithms for solving mixed-integer linear programs. For both algorithms, disjunctions play an important role, being used both as branching candidates and as the foundation for some cutting planes. We relate branching decisions and cutting planes to each other through the underlying disjunctions that they are based on, with a focus on Gomory mixed-integer cuts and their corresponding split disjunctions. We show that selecting branching decisions based on quality measures of Gomory mixed-integer cuts leads to relatively small branch-and-bound trees, and that the result improves when using cuts that more accurately represent the branching decisions. Finally, we show how the history of previously computed Gomory mixed-integer cuts can be used to improve the performance of the state-of-the-art hybrid branching rule of SCIP. Our results show a 4% decrease in solve time, and an 8% decrease in number of nodes over affected instances of MIPLIB 2017. T3 - ZIB-Report - 23-17 KW - cutting plane selection KW - variable selection KW - mixed-integer programming Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-91120 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Turner, Mark A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Besançon, Mathieu T1 - A Context-Aware Cutting Plane Selection Algorithm for Mixed-Integer Programming N2 - The current cut selection algorithm used in mixed-integer programming solvers has remained largely unchanged since its creation. In this paper, we propose a set of new cut scoring measures, cut filtering techniques, and stopping criteria, extending the current state-of-the-art algorithm and obtaining a 5\% performance improvement for SCIP over the MIPLIB 2017 benchmark set. T3 - ZIB-Report - 23-21 KW - cutting plane selection KW - mixed-integer programming Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-91691 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Shinano, Yuji A1 - Achterberg, Tobias A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Heinz, Stefan A1 - Koch, Thorsten A1 - Winkler, Michael T1 - Solving Previously Unsolved MIP Instances with ParaSCIP on Supercomputers by using up to 80,000 Cores N2 - Mixed-integer programming (MIP) problem is arguably among the hardest classes of optimization problems. This paper describes how we solved 21 previously unsolved MIP instances from the MIPLIB benchmark sets. To achieve these results we used an enhanced version of ParaSCIP, setting a new record for the largest scale MIP computation: up to 80,000 cores in parallel on the Titan supercomputer. In this paper, we describe the basic parallelization mechanism of ParaSCIP, improvements of the dynamic load balancing and novel techniques to exploit the power of parallelization for MIP solving. We give a detailed overview of computing times and statistics for solving open MIPLIB instances. T3 - ZIB-Report - 20-16 KW - Mixed Integer Programming, Parallel processing, Node merging, Racing, ParaSCIP, Ubiquity Generator Framework, MIPLIB Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-78393 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Gamrath, Gerald A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Heinz, Stefan A1 - Winkler, Michael T1 - Structure-Based Primal Heuristics for Mixed Integer Programming T2 - Optimization in the Real World N2 - Primal heuristics play an important role in the solving of mixed integer programs (MIPs). They help to reach optimality faster and provide good feasible solutions early in the solving process. In this paper, we present two new primal heuristics which take into account global structures available within MIP solvers to construct feasible solutions at the beginning of the solving process. These heuristics follow a large neighborhood search (LNS) approach and use global structures to define a neighborhood that is with high probability significantly easier to process while (hopefully) still containing good feasible solutions. The definition of the neighborhood is done by iteratively fixing variables and propagating these fixings. Thereby, fixings are determined based on the predicted impact they have on the subsequent domain propagation. The neighborhood is solved as a sub-MIP and solutions are transferred back to the original problem. Our computational experiments on standard MIP test sets show that the proposed heuristics find solutions for about every third instance and therewith help to improve the average solving time. Y1 - 2015 SN - 978-4-431-55419-6 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55420-2_3 VL - 13 SP - 37 EP - 53 PB - Springer Japan ER - TY - GEN A1 - Witzig, Jakob A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Heinz, Stefan T1 - Experiments with Conflict Analysis in Mixed Integer Programming N2 - The analysis of infeasible subproblems plays an import role in solving mixed integer programs (MIPs) and is implemented in most major MIP solvers. There are two fundamentally different concepts to generate valid global constraints from infeasible subproblems. The first is to analyze the sequence of implications obtained by domain propagation that led to infeasibility. The result of the analysis is one or more sets of contradicting variable bounds from which so-called conflict constraints can be generated. This concept has its origin in solving satisfiability problems and is similarly used in constraint programming. The second concept is to analyze infeasible linear programming (LP) relaxations. The dual LP solution provides a set of multipliers that can be used to generate a single new globally valid linear constraint. The main contribution of this short paper is an empirical evaluation of two ways to combine both approaches. Experiments are carried out on general MIP instances from standard public test sets such as Miplib2010; the presented algorithms have been implemented within the non-commercial MIP solver SCIP. Moreover, we present a pool-based approach to manage conflicts which addresses the way a MIP solver traverses the search tree better than aging strategies known from SAT solving. T3 - ZIB-Report - 16-63 Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-61087 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Mexi, Gioni A1 - Salvagnin, Domenico T1 - Using Multiple Reference Vectors and Objective Scaling in the Feasibility Pump JF - EURO Journal on Computational Optimization N2 - The Feasibility Pump (FP) is one of the best-known primal heuristics for mixed-integer programming (MIP): more than 15 papers suggested various modifications of all of its steps. So far, no variant considered information across multiple iterations, but all instead maintained the principle to optimize towards a single reference integer point. In this paper, we evaluate the usage of multiple reference vectors in all stages of the FP algorithm. In particular, we use LP-feasible vectors obtained during the main loop to tighten the variable domains before entering the computationally expensive enumeration stage. Moreover, we consider multiple integer reference vectors to explore further optimizing directions and introduce alternative objective scaling terms to balance the contributions of the distance functions and the original MIP objective. Our computational experiments demonstrate that the new method can improve performance on general MIP test sets. In detail, our modifications provide a 29.3% solution quality improvement and 4.0% running time improvement in an embedded setting, needing 16.0% fewer iterations over a large test set of MIP instances. In addition, the method’s success rate increases considerably within the first few iterations. In a standalone setting, we also observe a moderate performance improvement, which makes our version of FP suitable for the two main use-cases of the algorithm. Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-87392 VL - 11 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Ralphs, Ted A1 - Shinano, Yuji A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Koch, Thorsten ED - Hamadi, Youssef T1 - Parallel Solvers for Mixed Integer Linear Optimization T2 - Handbook of Parallel Constraint Reasoning Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63516-3_8 SP - 283 EP - 336 PB - Springer Nature ER - TY - GEN A1 - Achterberg, Tobias A1 - Berthold, Timo T1 - Improving the Feasibility Pump N2 - The Feasibility Pump of Fischetti, Glover, Lodi, and Bertacco has proved to be a very successful heuristic for finding feasible solutions of mixed integer programs. The quality of the solutions in terms of the objective value, however, tends to be poor. This paper proposes a slight modification of the algorithm in order to find better solutions. Extensive computational results show the success of this variant: in 89 out of 121 MIP instances the modified version produces improved solutions in comparison to the original Feasibility Pump. T3 - ZIB-Report - 05-42 KW - mixed integer programming KW - primal heuristics KW - feasibility pump Y1 - 2005 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-8754 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bolusani, Suresh A1 - Besançon, Mathieu A1 - Gleixner, Ambros A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - D'Ambrosio, Claudia A1 - Muñoz, Gonzalo A1 - Paat, Joseph A1 - Thomopulos, Dimitri T1 - The MIP workshop 2023 computational competition on reoptimization JF - Mathematical Programming Computation N2 - This paper describes the computational challenge developed for a computational competition held in 2023 for the 20th anniversary of the Mixed Integer Programming Workshop. The topic of this competition was reoptimization, also known as warm starting, of mixed integer linear optimization problems after slight changes to the input data for a common formulation. The challenge was to accelerate the proof of optimality of the modified instances by leveraging the information from the solving processes of previously solved instances, all while creating high-quality primal solutions. Specifically, we discuss the competition’s format, the creation of public and hidden datasets, and the evaluation criteria. Our goal is to establish a methodology for the generation of benchmark instances and an evaluation framework, along with benchmark datasets, to foster future research on reoptimization of mixed integer linear optimization problems. Y1 - 2024 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s12532-024-00256-w VL - 16 SP - 255 EP - 266 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Mexi, Gioni A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Gleixner, Ambros A1 - Nordström, Jakob T1 - Improving Conflict Analysis in MIP Solvers by Pseudo-Boolean Reasoning T2 - 29th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2023) N2 - Conflict analysis has been successfully generalized from Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solving to mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers, but although MIP solvers operate with general linear inequalities, the conflict analysis in MIP has been limited to reasoning with the more restricted class of clausal constraint. This is in contrast to how conflict analysis is performed in so-called pseudo-Boolean solving, where solvers can reason directly with 0-1 integer linear inequalities rather than with clausal constraints extracted from such inequalities. In this work, we investigate how pseudo-Boolean conflict analysis can be integrated in MIP solving, focusing on 0-1 integer linear programs (0-1 ILPs). Phrased in MIP terminology, conflict analysis can be understood as a sequence of linear combinations and cuts. We leverage this perspective to design a new conflict analysis algorithm based on mixed integer rounding (MIR) cuts, which theoretically dominates the state-of-the-art division-based method in pseudo-Boolean solving. We also report results from a first proof-of-concept implementation of different pseudo-Boolean conflict analysis methods in the open-source MIP solver SCIP. When evaluated on a large and diverse set of 0-1 ILP instances from MIPLIB2017, our new MIR-based conflict analysis outperforms both previous pseudo-Boolean methods and the clause-based method used in MIP. Our conclusion is that pseudo-Boolean conflict analysis in MIP is a promising research direction that merits further study, and that it might also make sense to investigate the use of such conflict analysis to generate stronger no-goods in constraint programming. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CP.2023.27 VL - 280 SP - 27:1 EP - 27:19 PB - Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Csizmadia, Zsolt A1 - Berthold, Timo T1 - The confined primal integral: a measure to benchmark heuristic MINLP solvers against global MINLP solvers JF - Mathematical Programming N2 - It is a challenging task to fairly compare local solvers and heuristics against each other and against global solvers. How does one weigh a faster termination time against a better quality of the found solution? In this paper, we introduce the confined primal integral, a new performance measure that rewards a balance of speed and solution quality. It emphasizes the early part of the solution process by using an exponential decay. Thereby, it avoids that the order of solvers can be inverted by choosing an arbitrarily large time limit. We provide a closed analytic formula to compute the confined primal integral a posteriori and an incremental update formula to compute it during the run of an algorithm. For the latter, we show that we can drop one of the main assumptions of the primal integral, namely the knowledge of a fixed reference solution to compare against. Furthermore, we prove that the confined primal integral is a transitive measure when comparing local solves with different final solution values. Finally, we present a computational experiment where we compare a local MINLP solver that uses certain classes of cutting planes against a solver that does not. Both versions show very different tendencies w.r.t. average running time and solution quality, and we use the confined primal integral to argue which of the two is the preferred setting. Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10107-020-01547-5 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Witzig, Jakob A1 - Berthold, Timo T1 - Conflict Analysis for MINLP JF - INFORMS Journal on Computing N2 - The generalization of MIP techniques to deal with nonlinear, potentially non-convex, constraints have been a fruitful direction of research for computational MINLP in the last decade. In this paper, we follow that path in order to extend another essential subroutine of modern MIP solvers towards the case of nonlinear optimization: the analysis of infeasible subproblems for learning additional valid constraints. To this end, we derive two different strategies, geared towards two different solution approaches. These are using local dual proofs of infeasibility for LP-based branch-and-bound and the creation of nonlinear dual proofs for NLP-based branch-and-bound, respectively. We discuss implementation details of both approaches and present an extensive computational study, showing that both techniques can significantly enhance performance when solving MINLPs to global optimality. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2020.1050 VL - 33 IS - 2 SP - 421 EP - 435 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gamrath, Gerald A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Salvagnin, Domenico T1 - An exploratory computational analysis of dual degeneracy in mixed-integer programming JF - EURO Journal on Computational Optimization N2 - Dual degeneracy, i.e., the presence of multiple optimal bases to a linear programming (LP) problem, heavily affects the solution process of mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers. Different optimal bases lead to different cuts being generated, different branching decisions being taken and different solutions being found by primal heuristics. Nevertheless, only a few methods have been published that either avoid or exploit dual degeneracy. The aim of the present paper is to conduct a thorough computational study on the presence of dual degeneracy for the instances of well-known public MIP instance collections. How many instances are affected by dual degeneracy? How degenerate are the affected models? How does branching affect degeneracy: Does it increase or decrease by fixing variables? Can we identify different types of degenerate MIPs? As a tool to answer these questions, we introduce a new measure for dual degeneracy: the variable–constraint ratio of the optimal face. It provides an estimate for the likelihood that a basic variable can be pivoted out of the basis. Furthermore, we study how the so-called cloud intervals—the projections of the optimal face of the LP relaxations onto the individual variables—evolve during tree search and the implications for reducing the set of branching candidates. Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s13675-020-00130-z IS - 8 SP - 241 EP - 246 ER -