TY - JOUR A1 - Gamrath, Gerald T1 - Improving strong branching by domain propagation JF - EURO Journal on Computational Optimization 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 MIP solvers usually apply 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, the state-of-the-art hybrid branching rule can be improved this way as well. This paper extends previous work by the author published in the proceedings of the CPAIOR 2013. Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s13675-014-0021-8 VL - 2 IS - 3 SP - 99 EP - 122 PB - Springer CY - Berlin Heidelberg ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Berthold, Timo A1 - Hendel, Gregor T1 - Shift-and-Propagate JF - Journal of Heuristics N2 - In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the design of general purpose primal heuristics for use inside complete mixed integer programming solvers. Many of these heuristics rely on an optimal LP solution, which may take a significant amount of time to find. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing a pre-root primal heuristic that does not require a previously found LP solution. This heuristic, named Shift-and-Propagate , applies domain propagation techniques to quickly drive a variable assignment towards feasibility. Computational experiments indicate that this heuristic is a powerful supplement to existing rounding and propagation heuristics. Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-014-9271-0 VL - 21 IS - 1 SP - 73 EP - 106 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Gamrath, Gerald A1 - Koch, Thorsten A1 - Rehfeldt, Daniel A1 - Shinano, Yuji T1 - SCIP-Jack - A massively parallel STP solver N2 - In this article we describe the impact from embedding a 15 year old model for solving the Steiner tree problem in graphs in a state-of-the-art MIP-Framework, making the result run in a massively parallel environment and extending the model to solve as many variants as possible. We end up with a high-perfomance solver that is capable of solving previously unsolved instances and, in contrast to its predecessor, is freely available for academic research. T3 - ZIB-Report - 14-35 KW - Steiner Tree Problem KW - Mixed-Integer Programming KW - Branch-and-Cut KW - DIMACS Challenge Y1 - 2014 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-52293 SN - 1438-0064 ER -