TY - GEN A1 - Ralphs, Ted A1 - Shinano, Yuji A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Koch, Thorsten T1 - Parallel Solvers for Mixed Integer Linear Programming N2 - In this article, we introduce parallel mixed integer linear programming (MILP) solvers. MILP solving algorithms have been improved tremendously in the last two decades. Currently, commercial MILP solvers are known as a strong optimization tool. Parallel MILP solver development has started in 1990s. However, since the improvements of solving algorithms have much impact to solve MILP problems than application of parallel computing, there were not many visible successes. With the spread of multi-core CPUs, current state-of-the-art MILP solvers have parallel implementations and researches to apply parallelism in the solving algorithm also getting popular. We summarize current existing parallel MILP solver architectures. T3 - ZIB-Report - 16-74 KW - parallel computing KW - integer programming KW - branch-and-bound KW - supercomputing Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-62239 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Hendel, Gregor A1 - Koch, Thorsten T1 - The Three Phases of MIP Solving N2 - Modern MIP solvers employ dozens of auxiliary algorithmic components to support the branch-and-bound search in finding and improving primal solutions and in strengthening the dual bound. Typically, all components are tuned to minimize the average running time to prove optimality. In this article, we take a different look at the run of a MIP solver. We argue that the solution process consists of three different phases, namely achieving feasibility, improving the incumbent solution, and proving optimality. We first show that the entire solving process can be improved by adapting the search strategy with respect to the phase-specific aims using different control tunings. Afterwards, we provide criteria to predict the transition between the individual phases and evaluate the performance impact of altering the algorithmic behavior of the MIP solver SCIP at the predicted phase transition points. T3 - ZIB-Report - 16-78 KW - optimization software KW - mixed-integer programming KW - branch-and-bound KW - adaptive search behavior KW - optimality prediction Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-61607 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Hiller, Benjamin A1 - Koch, Thorsten A1 - Schewe, Lars A1 - Schwarz, Robert A1 - Schweiger, Jonas T1 - A System to Evaluate Gas Network Capacities: Concepts and Implementation N2 - Since 2005, the gas market in the European Union is liberalized and the trading of natural gas is decoupled from its transport. The transport is done by so-called transmissions system operators or TSOs. The market model established by the European Union views the gas transmission network as a black box, providing shippers (gas traders and consumers) the opportunity to transport gas from any entry to any exit. TSOs are required to offer maximum independent capacities at each entry and exit such that the resulting gas flows can be realized by the network without compromising security of supply. Therefore, evaluating the available transport capacities is extremely important to the TSOs. This paper gives an overview of the toolset for evaluating gas network capacities that has been developed within the ForNe project, a joint research project of seven research partners initiated by Open Grid Europe, Germany's biggest TSO. While most of the relevant mathematics is described in the book "Evaluating Gas Network Capacities", this article sketches the system as a whole, describes some developments that have taken place recently, and gives some details about the current implementation. T3 - ZIB-Report - 17-03 KW - operations research in energy KW - gas network optimization KW - entry-exit model KW - freely allocable capacity KW - large-scale mixed-integer nonlinear programming Y1 - 2017 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-61931 SN - 1438-0064 N1 - A revised and extended version is available as ZIB-Report 18-11. ER - TY - GEN A1 - Bestuzheva, Ksenia A1 - Besançon, Mathieu A1 - Chen, Wei-Kun A1 - Chmiela, Antonia A1 - Donkiewicz, Tim A1 - van 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 - van der Hulst, Rolf A1 - Koch, Thorsten A1 - Lübbecke, Marco A1 - Maher, Stephen J. A1 - Matter, Frederic A1 - Mühmer, Erik A1 - Müller, Benjamin A1 - Pfetsch, Marc E. 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 - The SCIP Optimization Suite 8.0 N2 - The SCIP Optimization Suite provides a collection of software packages for mathematical optimization centered around the constraint integer programming framework SCIP. This paper discusses enhancements and extensions contained in version 8.0 of the SCIP Optimization Suite. Major updates in SCIP include improvements in symmetry handling and decomposition algorithms, new cutting planes, a new plugin type for cut selection, and a complete rework of the way nonlinear constraints are handled. Additionally, SCIP 8.0 now supports interfaces for Julia as well as Matlab. Further, UG now includes a unified framework to parallelize all solvers, a utility to analyze computational experiments has been added to GCG, dual solutions can be postsolved by PaPILO, new heuristics and presolving methods were added to SCIP-SDP, and additional problem classes and major performance improvements are available in SCIP-Jack. T3 - ZIB-Report - 21-41 KW - Constraint integer programming KW - Linear programming KW - Mixed-integer linear programming KW - Mixed-integer nonlinear programming KW - Optimization solver KW - Branch-and-cut KW - Branch-and-price KW - Column generation KW - Parallelization KW - Mixed-integer semidefinite programming Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-85309 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Bolusani, Suresh A1 - Besançon, Mathieu A1 - Bestuzheva, Ksenia A1 - Chmiela, Antonia A1 - Dionísio, João A1 - Donkiewicz, Tim A1 - van Doornmalen, Jasper A1 - Eifler, Leon A1 - Ghannam, Mohammed A1 - Gleixner, Ambros A1 - Graczyk, Christoph A1 - Halbig, Katrin A1 - Hedtke, Ivo A1 - Hoen, Alexander A1 - Hojny, Christopher A1 - van der Hulst, Rolf A1 - Kamp, Dominik A1 - Koch, Thorsten A1 - Kofler, Kevin A1 - Lentz, Jurgen A1 - Manns, Julian A1 - Mexi, Gioni A1 - Mühmer, Erik A1 - E. Pfetsch, Marc A1 - Schlösser, Franziska A1 - Serrano, Felipe A1 - Shinano, Yuji A1 - Turner, Mark A1 - Vigerske, Stefan A1 - Weninger, Dieter A1 - Xu, Liding T1 - The SCIP Optimization Suite 9.0 N2 - The SCIP Optimization Suite provides a collection of software packages for mathematical optimization, centered around the constraint integer programming framework SCIP. This report discusses the enhancements and extensions included in the SCIP Optimization Suite 9.0. The updates in SCIP 9.0 include improved symmetry handling, additions and improvements of nonlinear handlers and primal heuristics, a new cut generator and two new cut selection schemes, a new branching rule, a new LP interface, and several bug fixes. The SCIP Optimization Suite 9.0 also features new Rust and C++ interfaces for SCIP, new Python interface for SoPlex, along with enhancements to existing interfaces. The SCIP Optimization Suite 9.0 also includes new and improved features in the LP solver SoPlex, the presolving library PaPILO, the parallel framework UG, the decomposition framework GCG, and the SCIP extension SCIP-SDP. These additions and enhancements have resulted in an overall performance improvement of SCIP in terms of solving time, number of nodes in the branch-and-bound tree, as well as the reliability of the solver. T3 - ZIB-Report - 24-02-29 KW - Constraint integer programming KW - Linear programming KW - Mixed-integer linear programming KW - Mixed-integer nonlinear programming KW - Optimization solver KW - Branch-and-cut KW - Branch-and-price KW - Column generation KW - Parallelization KW - Mixed-integer semidefinite programming Y1 - 2024 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-95528 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Turner, Mark A1 - Chmiela, Antonia A1 - Koch, Thorsten A1 - Winkler, Michael T1 - PySCIPOpt-ML: Embedding Trained Machine Learning Models into Mixed-Integer Programs N2 - A standard tool for modelling real-world optimisation problems is mixed-integer programming (MIP). However, for many of these problems there is either incomplete information describing variable relations, or the relations between variables are highly complex. To overcome both these hurdles, machine learning (ML) models are often used and embedded in the MIP as surrogate models to represent these relations. Due to the large amount of available ML frameworks, formulating ML models into MIPs is highly non-trivial. In this paper we propose a tool for the automatic MIP formulation of trained ML models, allowing easy integration of ML constraints into MIPs. In addition, we introduce a library of MIP instances with embedded ML constraints. The project is available at https://github.com/Opt-Mucca/PySCIPOpt-ML. T3 - ZIB-Report - 23-28 Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-93095 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Kempke, Nils-Christian A1 - Koch, Thorsten T1 - Low-precision first-order method-based fix-and-propagate heuristics for large-scale mixed-integer linear optimization N2 - We investigate the use of low-precision first-order methods (FOMs) within a fix-and-propagate (FP) framework for solving mixed-integer programming problems (MIPs). FOMs, using only matrix-vector products instead of matrix factorizations, are well suited for GPU acceleration and have recently gained more attention for their application to large-scale linear programming problems (LPs). We employ PDLP, a variant of the Primal-Dual Hybrid Gradient (PDHG) method specialized to LP problems, to solve the LP-relaxation of our MIPs to low accuracy. This solution is used to motivate fixings within our fix-and-propagate framework. We implemented four different FP variants using primal and dual LP solution information. We evaluate the performance of our heuristics on MIPLIB 2017, showcasing that the low-accuracy LP solution produced by the FOM does not lead to a loss in quality of the FP heuristic solutions when compared to a high-accuracy interior-point method LP solution. Further, we use our FP framework to produce high-accuracy solutions for large-scale (up to 243 million non-zeros and 8 million decision variables) unit-commitment energy-system optimization models created with the modeling framework REMix. For the largest problems, we can generate solutions with under 2% primal-dual gap in less than 4 hours, whereas commercial solvers cannot generate feasible solutions within two days of runtime. This study represents the first successful application of FOMs in large-scale mixed-integer optimization, demonstrating their efficacy and establishing a foundation for future research in this domain. T3 - ZIB-Report - 25-04 KW - Integer programming KW - Large scale optimization KW - Linear Programming KW - Primal heuristics KW - OR in energy Y1 - 2025 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-99612 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Kempke, Nils-Christian A1 - Maher, Stephen John A1 - Rehfeldt, Daniel A1 - Gleixner, Ambros A1 - Koch, Thorsten A1 - Uslu, Svenja T1 - Distributed Parallel Structure-Aware Presolving for Arrowhead Linear Programs N2 - We present a structure-aware parallel presolve framework specialized to arrowhead linear programs (AHLPs) and designed for high-performance computing (HPC) environments, integrated into the parallel interior point solver PIPS-IPM++. Large-scale LPs arising from automated model generation frequently contain redundancies and numerical pathologies that necessitate effective presolve, yet existing presolve techniques are primarily serial or structure-agnostic and can become time-consuming in parallel solution workflows. Within PIPS-IPM++, AHLPs are stored in distributed memory, and our presolve builds on this to apply a highly parallel, distributed presolve across compute nodes while keeping communication overhead low and preserving the underlying arrowhead structure. We demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of our approach on a diverse set of AHLPs and compare it against state-of-the-art presolve implementations, including PaPILO and the presolve implemented within Gurobi. Even on a single machine, our presolve significantly outperforms PaPILO by a factor of 18 and Gurobi’s presolve by a factor of 6 in terms of shifted geometric mean runtime, while reducing the problems by a similar amount to PaPILO. Using a distributed compute environment, we outperform Gurobi's presolve by a factor of 13. T3 - ZIB-Report - 26-01 KW - Linear Programming KW - Presolving KW - Large-Scale Optimization KW - Distributed Parallel Computing KW - Arrowhead Y1 - 2026 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-103034 SN - 1438-0064 ER -