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In designing energy supply systems, designers should heighten the robustness in performance criteria against the uncertainty in energy demands. In this paper, a robust optimal design method using a hierarchi- cal mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) method is proposed to maximize the robustness of energy sup- ply systems under uncertain energy demands based on a mixed-integer linear model. A robust optimal design problem is formulated as a three-level min-max-min MILP one by expressing uncertain energy demands by intervals, evaluating the robustness in a performance criterion based on the minimax regret cri- terion, and considering relationships among integer design variables, uncertain energy demands, and inte- ger and continuous operation variables. This problem is solved by evaluating upper and lower bounds for the minimum of the maximum regret of the performance criterion repeatedly outside, and evaluating lower and upper bounds for the maximum regret repeatedly inside. Since these different types of optimization problems are difficult to solve even using commercial MILP solvers, they are solved by applying a hierarchi- cal MILP method developed for ordinary optimal design problems with its modifications. In a case study, the proposed approach is applied to the robust optimal design of a cogeneration system. Through the study, its validity and effectiveness are ascertained, and some features of the obtained robust designs are clarified.
In designing energy supply systems, designers should heighten the robustness in performance criteria against the uncertainty in energy demands. In this paper, a robust optimal design method using a hierarchical mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) method is proposed to maximize the robustness of energy supply systems under uncertain energy demands based on a mixed-integer linear model. A robust optimal design problem is formulated as a three-level min-max-min MILP one by expressing uncertain energy demands by intervals, evaluating the robustness in a performance criterion based on the minimax regret criterion, and considering relationships among integer design variables, uncertain energy demands, and integer and continuous operation variables. This problem is solved by evaluating upper and lower bounds for the minimum of the maximum regret of the performance criterion repeatedly outside, and evaluating lower and upper bounds for the maximum regret repeatedly inside. Different types of optimization problems are solved by applying a hierarchical MILP method developed for ordinary optimal design problems without and with its modifications. In a case study, the proposed approach is applied to the robust optimal design of a cogeneration system. Through the study, its validity and effectiveness are ascertained, and some features of the obtained robust designs are clarified.
Consolidation of commodities and coordination of vehicle routes are fundamental features of supply chain management problems. While locations for consolidation and coordination are typically known a priori, in adaptive transportation networks this is not the case. The identification of such consolidation locations forms part of the decision making process. Supply chain management problems integrating the designation of consolidation locations with the coordination of long haul and local vehicle routing is not only challenging to solve, but also very difficult to formulate mathematically. In this paper, the first mathematical model integrating location clustering with long haul and local vehicle routing is proposed. This mathematical formulation is used to develop algorithms to find high quality solutions. A novel parallel framework is developed that combines exact and heuristic methods to improve the search for high quality solutions and provide valid bounds. The results demonstrate that using exact methods to guide heuristic search is an effective approach to find high quality solutions for difficult supply chain management problems.
Branch-and-bound (B&B) is an algorithmic framework for solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. Although several well-designed software frameworks for parallel B&B have been developed over the last two decades, there is very few literature about successfully solving previously intractable combinatorial optimization problem instances to optimality by using such frameworks.The main reason for this limited impact of parallel solvers is that the algorithmic improvements for specific problem types are significantly greater than performance gains obtained by parallelization in general. Therefore, in order to solve hard problem instances for the first time, one needs to accelerate state-of-the-art algorithm implementations. In this paper, we present a computational study for solving Steiner tree problems and mixed integer semidefinite programs in parallel. These state-of-the-art algorithm implementations are based on SCIP and were parallelized via the ug[SCIP-*,*]-libraries---by adding less than 200 lines of glue code. Despite the ease of their parallelization, these solvers have the potential to solve previously intractable instances. In this paper, we demonstrate the convenience of such a parallelization and present results for previously unsolvable instances from the well-known PUC benchmark set, widely regarded as the most difficult Steiner tree test set in the literature.
Branch-and-bound (B&B) is an algorithmic framework for solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. Although several well-designed software frameworks for parallel B&B have been developed over the last two decades, there is very few literature about successfully solving previously intractable combinatorial optimization problem instances to optimality by using such frameworks.The main reason for this limited impact of parallel solvers is that the algorithmic improvements for specific problem types are significantly greater than performance gains obtained by parallelization in general. Therefore, in order to solve hard problem instances for the first time, one needs to accelerate state-of-the-art algorithm implementations. In this paper, we present a computational study for solving Steiner tree problems and mixed integer semidefinite programs in parallel. These state-of-the-art algorithm implementations are based on SCIP and were parallelized via the ug[SCIP-*,*]-libraries---by adding less than 200 lines of glue code. Despite the ease of their parallelization, these solvers have the potential to solve previously intractable instances. In this paper, we demonstrate the convenience of such a parallelization and present results for previously unsolvable instances from the well-known PUC benchmark set, widely regarded as the most difficult Steiner tree test set in the literature.
It is important to design multi-energy supply systems optimally in consideration of their operations for variations in energy demands. An approach for efficiently solving such an optimal design problem with a large number of periods for variations in energy demands is to derive an approximate optimal design solution by time series aggregation. However, such an approach does not provide any information on the accuracy for the optimal value of the objective function. In this paper, an effective approach for time series aggregation is proposed to derive an approximate optimal design solution and evaluate a proper gap between the upper and lower bounds for the optimal value of the objective function based on a mixed-integer linear model. In accordance with aggregation, energy demands are relaxed to uncertain parameters and the problem for deriving an approximate optimal design solution and evaluating it is transformed to a three-level optimization problem, and it is solved by applying both the robust and hierarchical optimization methods. A case study is conducted on a cogeneration system with a practical configuration, and it turns out that the proposed approach enables one to derive much smaller gaps as compared with those obtained by a conventional approach.
Tai256c is the largest unsolved quadratic assignment problem (QAP) instance in QAPLIB. It is known that QAP tai256c can be converted into a 256 dimensional binary quadratic optimization problem (BQOP) with a single cardinality constraint which requires the sum of the binary variables to be 92. As the BQOP is much simpler than the original QAP, the conversion increases the possibility to solve the QAP. Solving exactly the BQOP, however, is still very difficult. Indeed, a 1.48% gap remains between the best known upper bound (UB) and lower bound (LB) of the unknown optimal value. This paper shows that the BQOP admits a nontrivial symmetry, a property that makes the BQOP very hard to solve. The symmetry induces equivalent subproblems in branch and bound (BB) methods. To effectively improve the LB, we propose an efficient BB method that incorporates a doubly nonnegative relaxation, the standard orbit branching and a technique to prune equivalent subproblems. With this BB method, a new LB with 1.25% gap is successfully obtained, and computing an LB with 1.0% gap is shown to be still quite difficult.
Empirical studies are fundamental in assessing the effectiveness of implementations of branch-and-bound algorithms. The complexity of such implementations makes empirical study difficult for a wide variety of reasons. Various attempts have been made to develop and codify a set of standard techniques for the assessment of optimization algorithms and their software implementations; however, most previous work has been focused on classical sequential algorithms. Since parallel computation has become increasingly mainstream, it is necessary to re-examine and modernize these practices. In this paper, we propose a framework for assessment based on the notion that resource consumption is at the heart of what we generally refer to as the “effectiveness” of an implementation. The proposed framework carefully distinguishes between an implementation’s baseline efficiency, the efficacy with which it utilizes a fixed allocation of resources, and its scalability, a measure of how the efficiency changes as resources (typically additional computing cores) are added or removed. Efficiency is typically applied to sequential implementations, whereas scalability is applied to parallel implementations. Efficiency and scalability are both important contributors in determining the overall effectiveness of a given parallel implementation, but the goal of improved efficiency is often at odds with the goal of improved scalability. Within the proposed framework, we review the challenges to effective evaluation and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of existing methods of assessment.