90-XX OPERATIONS RESEARCH, MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING
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The Steiner tree problem in graphs is a classical problem that commonly arises in practical applications as one of many variants. Although the different Steiner tree problem variants are usually strongly related, solution approaches employed so far have been prevalently problem-specific. Against this backdrop, the solver SCIP-Jack was created as a general-purpose framework that can be used to solve the classical Steiner tree problem and 11 of its variants. This versatility is achieved by transforming various problem variants into a general form and solving them by using a state-of-the-art MIP-framework. Furthermore, SCIP-Jack includes various newly developed algorithmic components such as preprocessing routines and heuristics. The result is a high-performance solver that can be employed in massively parallel environments and is capable of solving previously unsolved instances. After the introduction of SCIP-Jack at the 2014 DIMACS Challenge on Steiner problems, the overall performance of the solver has considerably improved. This article provides an overview on the current state.
Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) heuristics are among the most powerful but also most expensive heuristics for mixed integer programs (MIP). Ideally, a solver learns adaptively which LNS heuristics work best for the MIP problem at hand in order to concentrate its limited computational budget.
To this end, this work introduces Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) for MIP, a primal heuristic that acts a framework for eight popular LNS heuristics such as Local Branching and Relaxation Induced Neighborhood Search (RINS). We distinguish the available LNS heuristics by their individual search domains, which we call neighborhoods. The decision which neighborhood should be executed is guided by selection strategies for the multi armed bandit problem, a related optimization problem during which suitable actions have to be chosen to maximize a reward function. In this paper, we propose an LNS-specific reward function to learn to distinguish between the available neighborhoods based on successful calls and failures. A second, algorithmic enhancement is a generic variable fixing priorization, which ALNS employs to adjust the subproblem complexity as needed. This is particularly useful for some neighborhoods which do not fix variables by themselves. The proposed primal heuristic has been implemented
within the MIP solver SCIP. An extensive computational study is conducted to compare different LNS strategies within our ALNS framework on a large set of publicly available MIP instances from the MIPLIB and Coral benchmark sets. The results of this simulation are used to calibrate the parameters of the bandit selection strategies. A second computational experiment shows the computational benefits of the proposed ALNS framework within the MIP solver SCIP.
Mixed integer programming is a versatile and valuable optimization tool. However, solving specific problem instances can be computationally demanding even for cutting-edge solvers. Such long running times are often significantly reduced by an appropriate change of the solver's parameters. In this paper we investigate "algorithm selection", the task of choosing among a set of algorithms the ones that are likely to perform best for a particular instance.
In our case, we treat different parameter settings of the MIP solver SCIP as different algorithms to choose from. Two peculiarities of the MIP solving process have our special attention. We address the well-known problem of performance variability by using multiple random seeds. Besides solving time, primal dual integrals are recorded as a second performance measure in order to distinguish solvers that timed out.
We collected feature and performance data for a large set of publicly available MIP instances. The algorithm selection problem is addressed by several popular, feature-based methods, which have been partly extended for our purpose. Finally, an analysis of the feature space and performance results of the selected algorithms are presented.
Mit dem Voranschreiten der Technologie erhalten die öffentlichen Verkehrsmittel eine größere Bedeutung. Die Beförderung mehrerer Personen eröffnet der Gesellschaft viele Möglichkeiten, unter Anderem den Vorteil der Zeitersparnis. Die Dauer des Verkehrswegs mit öffentlichen Verkehrsmitteln ist häufig geringer, als die mit individuellen Verkehrsmitteln. Jedes öffentliche Transportmittel ist mit einem Fahrplan versehen. Dieser bietet Passagieren, die öffentliche Verkehrsmittel öfter nutzen, eine Strukturierung und Planung ihrer Zeit. Dabei lassen sich Taktfahrpläne aufgrund ihres periodischen Verhaltens leicht einprägen. Dieses periodische Verhalten ist durch mathematische Modellierungen darstellbar. Das persönliche Nutzverhalten vieler Bürger im Personenverkehr ist auf die öffentlichen Verkehrsmittel beschränkt. Diese beinhalten im Gegensatz zum individuellen Verkehrsmittel eine Wartezeit. Dabei stellt sich die Frage, ob man anhand mathematischer Modelle diese Wartezeit minimieren kann. Eine bekannte mathematische Modellierung dieses Problems ist das Periodic Event Scheduling Problem (PESP). Die optimale Planung eines periodischen Taktfahrplanes steht im Vordergrund.
Während ich dieses Problem betrachtet habe, wurde ich auf das Rechnen mit linearen Gleichungssystemen modulo T aufmerksam. Bei periodischen Taktfahrplänen wird ein einheitliches zeitliches Muster, welches sich nach T Minuten wiederholt, betrachtet. Das dabei zu betrachtende Lösungsproblem eröffnet ein Teilgebiet der Mathematik, welches bislang nicht im Vordergrund stand: Das Lösen linearer Gleichungen modulo T, wobei T für die Zeit in Minuten steht und somit 60 ist. Da 60 keine Primzahl ist, kann – wie im Laufe der Arbeit präsentiert – das lineare Gleichungssystem nicht mehr über einen Körper gelöst werden. Lineare Gleichungssysteme werden nun über Nicht-Körpern betrachtet. Die Literatur weist sowohl im deutschsprachigem als auch im englischsprachigen Raum wenig Umfang bezüglich linearer Gleichungssysteme über Nicht-Körper auf. Der Bestand an Fachliteratur bezüglich den Themen lineare diophantische Gleichungssysteme, Hermite-
Normalform und Smith-Normalform ist zurzeit gering, dennoch erreichbar, beispielsweise in [1], welches in dieser Bachelorarbeit genutzt wurde. Insbesondere wurde ich bei der Suche nach geeigneter Literatur zu linearen Gleichungssystemen über Restklassenringe, die keinen Körper bilden, nicht fündig. Dabei recherchierte ich sowohl in den Universitätsbibliotheken als auch in webbasierenden Suchmaschinen.
Aufgrund dem geringen Bestand an Fachliteratur in diesem Kontext, war ich gezwungen, an vielen Stellen eigene logische Verknüpfungen zu konzipieren und zu beweisen. Dies brachte viele Schwierigkeiten mit sich, die mit bestmöglichem Verständnis bearbeitet wurden.
Abseits der Zugänglichkeit der Literatur, finde ich es sehr überraschend, dass sich viele Professoren der Mathematik mit diesem Themenbereich nicht beschäftigten. Insbesondere gingen von den Dozenten, die ich um Literaturempfehlung bat, kein Werk aus. Damit
wurde das Thema "Lineare Gleichungssysteme Modulo T" einerseits eine große Herausforderung, andererseits eine große Motivation, da ich mit dieser Bachelorarbeit vielen Interessenten der Mathematik als Sekundärliteratur dienen kann.
Das Wind-Interpolation-Problem (WIP) ist ein bisher selten diskutiertes Problem der Flugplanungsoptimierung, bei dem es darum geht, Wind-Komponenten auf einer Luftstraße zu approximieren. Anhand von Winddaten, die vektoriell an den Gitterpunkten eines den Globus umspannenden Gitters vorliegen, soll bestimmt werden, wie viel Wind entlang der Luftstraße und quer zu ihr weht. Thema dieser Arbeit ist ein Spezialfall des WIP, nämlich das statische WIP auf einer Planfläche (SWIPP). Dazu wird zuerst ein Algorithmus besprochen, der das SWIPP zwar löst, aber einem Ansatz zugrunde liegt, der bei genauerem Hinsehen nicht sinnvoll erscheint: hier wird Wind zwischen vier Punkten interpoliert, wozu es keine triviale Methode gibt. Ähnlich zu diesem Algorithmus, der heute als State-of-the-Art gilt, wird als Ergebnis dieser Arbeit ein neuer Algorithmus vorgestellt, der das SWIPP akkurater und schneller löst. Hier wird deutlich seltener
auf die Interpolation zwischen vier Punkten zurückgegriffen - stattdessen wird fast immer linear zwischen zwei Punkten interpoliert. Die Algorithmen zum Lösen des SWIPP werden auf ihre Genauigkeit,
asymptotische Laufzeit und Geschwindigkeit untersucht und verglichen. Als Testareal dienen zum einen echte Wetterdaten sowie das Luftstraßennetz, das die Erde umspannt, und zum anderen ein eigens generiertes Windfeld und fiktive Luftstraßen. Es wird gezeigt, dass der hier vorgestellte Algorithmus die State-of-the-Art-Variante in allen genannten Aspekten übertrifft.
Given a factorable function f, we propose a procedure that constructs a concave underestimor of f that is tight at a given point. These underestimators can be used to generate intersection cuts. A peculiarity of these underestimators is that they do not rely on a bounded domain. We propose a strengthening procedure for the intersection cuts that exploits the bounds of the domain. Finally, we propose an extension of monoidal strengthening to take advantage of the integrality of the non-basic variables.
All feasible flows in potential-driven networks
induce an orientation on the undirected graph underlying the network.
Clearly, these orientations must satisfy two conditions: they are acyclic and there are no "dead ends" in the network, i.e. each source requires outgoing flows, each sink requires incoming flows, and each transhipment vertex requires both an incoming and an outgoing flow. In this paper we will call orientations that satisfy these conditions acyclic source-transhipment-sink orientations (ASTS-orientation) and study their structure. In particular, we characterize graphs that allow for such an orientation, describe a way to enumerate all possible ASTS-orientations of a given graph, present an algorithm to simplify and decompose a graph before such an enumeration and shed light on the role of zero flows in the context of ASTS-orientations.
In commodity transport networks such as natural gas, hydrogen and water networks, flows arise from nonlinear potential differences between the nodes, which can be represented by so-called "potential-driven" network models. When operators of these networks face increasing demand or the need to handle more diverse transport situations, they regularly seek to expand the capacity of their network by building new pipelines parallel to existing ones ("looping").
The paper introduces a new mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model and a new non-linear programming (NLP) model and compares these with existing models for the looping problem and related problems in the literature, both theoretically and experimentally.
On this basis, we give recommendations about the circumstances under which a certain model should be used. In particular, it turns out that one of our novel models outperforms the existing models.
Moreover, the paper is the first to include the practically relevant option that a particular pipeline may be looped several times.
We establish a general computational framework for Chvátal’s conjecture based on exact rational integer programming. As a result we prove Chvátal’s conjecture holds for all downsets whose union of sets contains seven elements or less. The computational proof relies on an exact branch-and-bound certificate that allows for elementary verification and is independent of the integer programming solver used.
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.
Improving branching for disjunctive polyhedral models using approximate convex decompositions
(2018)
Disjunctive sets arise in a variety of optimization models and much esearch has been devoted to obtain strong relaxations for them. This paper focuses on the evaluation of the relaxation during the branch-and-bound search process. We argue that the branching possibilities (\ie binary variables) of the usual formulations are unsuitable to obtain strong bounds early in the search process as they do not capture the overall shape of the the entire disjunctive set. To analyze and exploit the shape of the disjunctive set we propose to compute a hierarchy of approximate convex decompositions and show how to extend the known formulations to obtain improved branching behavior.
We consider the modeling of operation modes for complex compressor stations (i.e., ones with several in- or outlets) in gas networks. In particular, we propose a refined model that allows to precompute tighter relaxations for each operation mode. These relaxations may be used to strengthen the compressor station submodels in gas network optimization problems. We provide a procedure to obtain the refined model from the input data for the original model. This procedure is based on a nontrivial reduction of the graph representing the gas flow through the compressor station in an operation mode.
During the past years hospitals saw themselves confronted with increasing economical pressure (WB06, p. V). Therefore, optimizing the general operational procedures has gained in importance. The revenue of a hospital depends on the kinds and quantity of treatments performed and on the effcient use and utilization of the corresponding resources. About 25 − 50% of the treatment costs of a patient needing surgery incurs in the operating rooms (WB06, p. 58). Hence skillful management of the operating rooms can have a large impact on the overall revenue of a hospital. Belien and Demeulemeester (BD07) describe the planning of operating room (OR) schedules as a multi-stage process. In the first stage OR time is allocated to the hospitals specialties and capacities and resources are adjusted. In the second stage a master surgery schedule (MSS) is developed, that is a timetable for D days that specifies the amount of OR time assigned to the specialties on every individual day. After D days this schedule will be repeated without any changes. Hence, developing an MSS is a long-term problem. Finally, specialties will schedule specific surgeries within their assigned OR time. In this work we will focus on the development of the MSS that maximizes the revenue of the hospital. Our main focus will be to ensure that the capacities of the downstream resources, i.e. the bed capacities in the ICU and ward, will not be exceeded. Additionally, we hope that our formulation of the problem will lead to a leveled bed demand without significant peaks. We will incorporate the uncertainty of patient demand and case mix in our model. There have been several approaches on this subject, for example in (Fü15) and (BD07) and this work is in part inuenced by these advances.
A Simple Way to Compute the Number of Vehicles That Are Required to Operate a Periodic Timetable
(2018)
We consider the following planning problem in public transportation: Given a
periodic timetable, how many vehicles are required to operate it?
In [9], for this sequential approach, it is proposed to first expand the periodic
timetable over time, and then answer the above question by solving a flow-based
aperiodic optimization problem.
In this contribution we propose to keep the compact periodic representation of
the timetable and simply solve a particular perfect matching problem. For practical
networks, it is very much likely that the matching problem decomposes into several
connected components. Our key observation is that there is no need to change any
turnaround decision for the vehicles of a line during the day, as long as the timetable
stays exactly the same.
Calculation of clinch and elimination numbers for sports leagues with multiple tiebreaking criteria
(2018)
The clinch (elimination) number is a minimal number of future wins (losses) needed to clinch (to be eliminated from) a specified place in a sports league. Several optimization models and computational results are shown in this paper for calculating clinch and elimination numbers in the presence of predefined multiple tiebreaking criteria. The main subject of this paper is to provide a general algorithmic framework based on integer programming with utilizing possibly multilayered upper and lower bounds.
A Polyhedral Study of Event-Based Models for the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem
(2018)
We consider event-based Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) models for the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) that represent an alternative to the common time-indexed model (DDT) of Pritsker et al. (1969) for the case where the underlying time horizon is large or job processing times are subject to huge variations. In contrast to the time-indexed model, the size of event-based models does not depend on the time horizon. For two event-based formulations OOE and SEE of Koné et al. (2011) we present new valid inequalities that dominate the original formulation. Additionally, we introduce a new event-based model: the Interval Event-Based Model (IEE). We deduce linear transformations between all three models that yield the strict domination order IEE > SEE > OOE for their linear programming (LP) relaxations, meaning that IEE has the strongest linear relaxation among the event-based models. We further show that the popular DDT formulation can be retrieved from IEE by certain polyhedral operations, thus giving a unifying view on a complete branch of MIP formulations for the RCPSP. In addition, we analyze the computational performance of all presented models on test instances of the PSPLIB (Kolisch and Sprecher 1997).
We consider the Cumulative Scheduling Problem (CuSP) in which a set of $n$ jobs must be scheduled according to release dates, due dates and cumulative resource constraints. In constraint programming, the CuSP is modeled as the cumulative constraint. Among the most common propagation algorithms for the CuSP there is energetic reasoning (Baptiste et al., 1999) with a complexity of O(n^3) and edge-finding (Vilim, 2009) with O(kn log n) where k <= n is the number of different resource demands. We consider the complete versions of the propagators that perform all deductions in one call of the algorithm. In this paper, we introduce the energetic edge-finding rule that is a generalization of both energetic reasoning and edge-finding. Our main result is a complete energetic edge-finding algorithm with a complexity of O(n^2 log n) which improves upon the complexity of energetic reasoning. Moreover, we show that a relaxation of energetic edge-finding with a complexity of O(n^2) subsumes edge-finding while performing stronger propagations from energetic reasoning. A further result shows that energetic edge-finding reaches its fixpoint in strongly polynomial time. Our main insight is that energetic schedules can be interpreted as a single machine scheduling problem from which we deduce a monotonicity property that is exploited in the algorithms. Hence, our algorithms improve upon the strength and the complexity of energetic reasoning and edge-finding whose complexity status seemed widely untouchable for the last decades.
Gas networks are an important application area for optimization. When considering long-range transmission, compressor stations play a crucial role in these applications. The purpose of this report is to collect and systematize the models used for compressor stations in the literature. The emphasis is on recent work on simple yet accurate polyhedral models that may replace more simplified traditional models without increasing model complexity. The report also describes an extension of the compressor station data available in GasLib (http://gaslib.zib.de/) with the parameters of these models.