G. Mathematics of Computing
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- Disjunctive Programming (1)
- MINLPs (1)
- Union of Polytopes (1)
- Volume Algorithm (1)
- acyclic orientations (1)
- competitive analysis (1)
- flow orientations (1)
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Improving relaxations for potential-driven network flow problems via acyclic flow orientations
(2018)
The class of potential-driven network flow problems provides important models for a range of infrastructure networks. For real-world applications, they need to be combined with integer
models for switching certain network elements, giving rise to hard-to-solve MINLPs. We observe that on large-scale real-world meshed networks the usually employed relaxations are rather weak due to cycles in the network.
We propose acyclic flow orientations as a combinatorial relaxation of feasible solutions of potential-driven flow problems and show how they can be used to strengthen existing relaxations. First computational results indicate that the strengthend model is much tighter than the original relaxation, thus promising a computational advantage.
Optimization models often feature disjunctions of polytopes as
submodels. Such a disjunctive set is initially (at best) relaxed to
its convex hull, which is then refined by branching.
To measure the error of the convex relaxation, the (relative)
difference between the volume of the convex hull and the volume of the
disjunctive set may be used. This requires a method to compute the
volume of the disjunctive set. Naively, this can be done via
inclusion/exclusion and leveraging the existing code for the volume
of polytopes. However, this is often inefficient.
We propose a revised variant of an old algorithm by Bieri and Nef
(1983) for this purpose. The algorithm uses a sweep-plane to
incrementally calculate the volume of the disjunctive set as a
function of the offset parameter of the sweep-plane.
In the last 20 years competitive analysis has become the main tool for
analyzing the quality of online algorithms. Despite of this,
competitive analysis has also been criticized: It sometimes cannot
discriminate between algorithms that exhibit significantly different
empirical behavior, or it even favors an algorithm that is worse from
an empirical point of view. Therefore, there have been several
approaches to circumvent these drawbacks. In this survey, we discuss
probabilistic alternatives for competitive analysis.