Refine
Year of publication
- 1997 (3) (remove)
Document Type
- ZIB-Report (3)
Language
- English (3)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3)
Institute
- ZIB Allgemein (3) (remove)
In this paper we investigate whether matrices arising from linear or integer programming problems can be decomposed into so-called {\em bordered block diagonal form}. More precisely, given some matrix $A$, we try to assign as many rows as possible to some number of blocks of limited size such that no two rows assigned to different blocks intersect in a common column. Bordered block diagonal form is desirable because it can guide and speed up the solution process for linear and integer programming problems. We show that various matrices from the %LP- and MIP-libraries \Netlib{} and MIPLIB can indeed be decomposed into this form by computing optimal decompositions or decompositions with proven quality. These computations are done with a branch-and-cut algorithm based on polyhedral investigations of the matrix decomposition problem.
In this paper we investigate whether matrices arising from linear or integer programming problems can be decomposed into so-called {\em bordered block diagonal form}. More precisely, given some matrix $A$, we try to assign as many rows as possible to some number of blocks of limited size such that no two rows assigned to different blocks intersect in a common column. Bordered block diagonal form is desirable because it can guide and speed up the solution process for linear and integer programming problems. We show that various matrices from the LP- and MIP-libraries NETLIB and MITLIB can indeed be decomposed into this form by computing optimal decompositions or decompositions with proven quality. These computations are done with a branch-and-cut algorithm based on polyhedral investigations of the matrix decomposition problem. In practice, however, one would use heuristics to find a good decomposition. We present several heuristic ideas and test their performance. Finally, we investigate the usefulness of optimal matrix decompositions into bordered block diagonal form for integer programming by using such decompositions to guide the branching process in a branch-and-cut code for general mixed integer programs.
We present a graph-theoretic model for the \emph{frequency assignment problem} in Cellular Phone Networks: Obeying several technical and legal restrictions, frequencies have to be assigned to transceivers so that interference is as small as possible. This optimization problem is NP-hard. Good approximation cannot be guaranteed, unless P = NP. We describe several assignment heuristics. These heuristics are simple and not too hard to implement. We give an assessment of the heuristics' efficiency and practical usefulness. For this purpose, typical instances of frequency assignment problems with up to 4240 transceivers and 75 frequencies of a German cellular phone network operator are used. The results are satisfying from a practitioner's point of view. The best performing heuristics were integrated into a network planning system used in practice.