TY - GEN A1 - Fügenschuh, Armin A1 - Geißler, Björn A1 - Gollmer, Ralf A1 - Hayn, Christine A1 - Henrion, Rene A1 - Hiller, Benjamin A1 - Humpola, Jesco A1 - Koch, Thorsten A1 - Lehmann, Thomas A1 - Martin, Alexander A1 - Mirkov, Radoslava A1 - Morsi, Antonio A1 - Römisch, Werner A1 - Rövekamp, Jessica A1 - Schewe, Lars A1 - Schmidt, Martin A1 - Schultz, Rüdiger A1 - Schwarz, Robert A1 - Schweiger, Jonas A1 - Stangl, Claudia A1 - Steinbach, Marc A1 - Willert, Bernhard T1 - Mathematical Optimization for Challenging Network Planning Problems in Unbundled Liberalized Gas Markets N2 - The recently imposed new gas market liberalization rules in Germany lead to a change of business of gas network operators. While previously network operator and gas vendor where united, they were forced to split up into independent companies. The network has to be open to any other gas trader at the same conditions, and free network capacities have to be identified and publicly offered in a non-discriminatory way. We show that these new paradigms lead to new and challenging mathematical optimization problems. In order to solve them and to provide meaningful results for practice, all aspects of the underlying problems, such as combinatorics, stochasticity, uncertainty, and nonlinearity, have to be addressed. With such special-tailored solvers, free network capacities and topological network extensions can, for instance, be determined. T3 - ZIB-Report - 13-13 KW - Gas Market Liberalization KW - Entry-Exit Model KW - Gas Network Access Regulation KW - Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Nonconvex Stochastic Optimization Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-17821 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Berthold, Timo T1 - Measuring the impact of primal heuristics N2 - In modern MIP solvers, primal heuristics play a major role in finding and improving feasible solutions early in the solution process. However, classical performance measures such as time to optimality or number of branch-and-bound nodes reflect the impact of primal heuristics on the overall solving process badly. This article discusses the question of how to evaluate the effect of primal heuristics. Therefore, we introduce a new performance measure, the "primal integral" which depends on the quality of solutions found during the solving process as well as on the points in time when they are found. Our computational results reveal that heuristics improve the performance of MIP solvers in terms of the primal bound by around 80%. Further, we compare five state-of-the-art MIP solvers w.r.t. the newly proposed measure. T3 - ZIB-Report - 13-17 KW - mixed integer programming KW - primal heuristic KW - performance measure Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-17887 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Gleixner, Ambros T1 - Undercover Branching N2 - In this paper, we present a new branching strategy for nonconvex MINLP that aims at driving the created subproblems towards linearity. It exploits the structure of a minimum cover of an MINLP, a smallest set of variables that, when fixed, render the remaining system linear: whenever possible, branching candidates in the cover are preferred. Unlike most branching strategies for MINLP, Undercover branching is not an extension of an existing MIP branching rule. It explicitly regards the nonlinearity of the problem while branching on integer variables with a fractional relaxation solution. Undercover branching can be naturally combined with any variable-based branching rule. We present computational results on a test set of general MINLPs from MINLPLib, using the new strategy in combination with reliability branching and pseudocost branching. The computational cost of Undercover branching itself proves negligible. While it turns out that it can influence the variable selection only on a smaller set of instances, for those that are affected, significant improvements in performance are achieved. T3 - ZIB-Report - 13-14 Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-18030 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Salvagnin, Domenico T1 - Cloud branching N2 - Branch-and-bound methods for mixed-integer programming (MIP) are traditionally based on solving a linear programming (LP) relaxation and branching on a variable which takes a fractional value in the (single) computed relaxation optimum. In this paper we study branching strategies for mixed-integer programs that exploit the knowledge of multiple alternative optimal solutions (a cloud) of the current LP relaxation. These strategies naturally extend state-of-the-art methods like strong branching, pseudocost branching, and their hybrids. We show that by exploiting dual degeneracy, and thus multiple alternative optimal solutions, it is possible to enhance traditional methods. We present preliminary computational results, applying the newly proposed strategy to full strong branching, which is known to be the MIP branching rule leading to the fewest number of search nodes. It turns out that cloud branching can reduce the mean running time by up to 30% on standard test sets. T3 - ZIB-Report - 13-01 KW - mixed integer programming KW - branching rule KW - search strategy KW - dual degeneracy Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-17301 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Hendel, Gregor T1 - Shift-And-Propagate N2 - For mixed integer programming, recent years have seen a growing interest in the design of general purpose primal heuristics for use inside complete solvers. Many of these heuristics rely on an optimal LP solution. Finding this may itself take a significant amount of time. The presented paper addresses this issue by the introduction of the Shift-And-Propagate heuristic. Shift-And-Propagate is a pre-root primal heuristic that does not require a previously found LP solution. It applies domain propagation techniques to quickly drive a variable assignment towards feasibility. Computational experiments indicate that this heuristic is a powerful supplement of existing rounding and propagation heuristics. T3 - ZIB-Report - 13-03 KW - primal heuristic KW - mixed integer programming KW - domain propagation KW - rounding Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-17596 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Gleixner, Ambros A1 - Heinz, Stefan A1 - Vigerske, Stefan T1 - Analyzing 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 a linear relaxation to solve MIQCPs to global optimality. Our analysis is based on a set of 86 publicly available test instances. T3 - ZIB-Report - 13-08 KW - mixed-integer quadratically constrained programming KW - mixed-integer programming KW - branch-and-cut KW - nonconvex KW - global optimization Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-17754 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Borndörfer, Ralf A1 - Hoang, Nam-Dung A1 - Karbstein, Marika A1 - Koch, Thorsten A1 - Martin, Alexander T1 - How Many Steiner Terminals Can You Connect in 20 Years? N2 - Steiner trees are constructed to connect a set of terminal nodes in a graph. This basic version of the Steiner tree problem is idealized, but it can effectively guide the search for successful approaches to many relevant variants, from both a theoretical and a computational point of view. This article illustrates the theoretical and algorithmic progress on Steiner tree type problems on two examples, the Steiner connectivity and the Steiner tree packing problem. T3 - ZIB-Report - 13-57 KW - Steiner tree KW - Steiner connectivity KW - Steiner tree packing Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-42524 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Berthold, Timo T1 - Primal MINLP Heuristics in a nutshell N2 - Primal heuristics are an important component of state-of-the-art codes for mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP). In this article we give a compact overview of primal heuristics for MINLP that have been suggested in the literature of recent years. We sketch the fundamental concepts of different classes of heuristics and discuss specific implementations. A brief computational experiment shows that primal heuristics play a key role in achieving feasibility and finding good primal bounds within a global MINLP solver. T3 - ZIB-Report - 13-42 KW - Primal Heuristic KW - MINLP KW - Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming KW - Feasibility Pump KW - Large Neighborhood Search Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-42170 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 hard MIPLIB2003 problems with ParaSCIP on Supercomputers: An update N2 - Contemporary supercomputers can easily provide years of CPU time per wall-clock hour. One challenge of today's software development is how to harness this wast computing power in order to solve really hard mixed integer programming instances. In 2010, two out of six open MIPLIB2003 instances could be solved by ParaSCIP in more than ten consecutive runs, restarting from checkpointing files. The contribution of this paper is threefold: For the first time, we present computational results of single runs for those two instances. Secondly, we provide new improved upper and lower bounds for all of the remaining four open MIPLIB2003 instances. Finally, we explain which new developments led to these results and discuss the current progress of ParaSCIP. Experiments were conducted on HLRNII, on HLRN III, and on the Titan supercomputer, using up to 35,200 cores. T3 - ZIB-Report - 13-66 KW - Mixed Integer Programming KW - MIPLIB2003 KW - ParaSCIP KW - Ubiquity Generator Framework KW - Supercomputer Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-42888 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Gamrath, Gerald A1 - Koch, Thorsten A1 - Martin, Alexander A1 - Miltenberger, Matthias A1 - Weninger, Dieter T1 - Progress in Presolving for Mixed Integer Programming N2 - Presolving attempts to eliminate redundant information from the problem formulation and simultaneously tries to strengthen the formulation. It can be very effective and is often essential for solving instances. Especially for mixed integer programming problems, fast and effective presolving algorithms are very important. In this paper, we report on three new presolving techniques. The first method searches for singleton continuous columns and tries to fix the corresponding variables. Then we present a presolving technique which exploits a partial order of the variables to induce fixings. Finally, we show an approach based on connected components in graphs. Our computational results confirm the profitable use of the algorithms in practice. T3 - ZIB-Report - 13-48 KW - mixed-integer programming KW - presolving KW - preprocessing Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-42530 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Gamrath, Gerald T1 - Improving strong branching by domain propagation N2 - One of the essential components of a branch-and-bound based mixed-integer linear programming (MIP) solver is the branching rule. Strong branching is a method used by many state-of-the-art branching rules to select the variable to branch on. It precomputes the dual bounds of potential child nodes by solving auxiliary linear programs (LPs) and thereby helps to take good branching decisions that lead to a small search tree. In this paper, we describe how these dual bound predictions can be improved by including domain propagation into strong branching. Domain propagation is a technique usually used at every node of the branch-and-bound tree to tighten the local domains of variables. Computational experiments on standard MIP instances indicate that our improved strong branching method significantly improves the quality of the predictions and causes almost no additional effort. For a full strong branching rule, we are able to obtain substantial reductions of the branch-and-bound tree size as well as the solving time. Moreover, also the state-of-the-art hybrid branching rule can be improved this way. This paper extends previous work by the author published in the proceedings of the CPAIOR 2013. T3 - ZIB-Report - 13-47 KW - mixed-integer programming KW - branch-and-bound KW - branching rule KW - variable selection KW - strong branching KW - domain propagation Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-42546 SN - 1438-0064 ER -