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Institute
- Mathematical Optimization Methods (14) (remove)
17-61
This article describes new features and enhanced algorithms made available in version 5.0 of the SCIP Optimization Suite. In its central component, the constraint integer programming solver SCIP, remarkable performance improvements have been achieved for solving mixed-integer linear and nonlinear programs. On MIPs, SCIP 5.0 is about 41 % faster than SCIP 4.0 and over twice as fast on instances that take at least 100 seconds to solve. For MINLP, SCIP 5.0 is about 17 % faster overall and 23 % faster on instances that take at least 100 seconds to solve. This boost is due to algorithmic advances in several parts of the solver such as cutting plane generation and management, a new adaptive coordination of large neighborhood search heuristics, symmetry handling, and strengthened McCormick relaxations for bilinear terms in MINLPs. Besides discussing the theoretical background and the implementational aspects of these developments, the report describes recent additions for the other software packages connected to SCIP, in particular for the LP solver SoPlex, the Steiner tree solver SCIP-Jack, the MISDP solver SCIP-SDP, and the parallelization framework UG.
17-75
Current linear energy system models (ESM) acquiring to provide sufficient detail and reliability frequently bring along problems of both high intricacy and increasing scale. Unfortunately, the size and complexity of these problems often prove to be intractable even for commercial state-of-the-art linear programming solvers. This article describes an interdisciplinary approach to exploit the intrinsic structure of these large-scale linear problems to be able to solve them on massively parallel high-performance computers. A key aspect are extensions to the parallel interior-point solver PIPS-IPM originally developed for stochastic optimization problems. Furthermore, a newly developed GAMS interface to the solver as well as some GAMS language extensions to model block-structured problems will be described.
17-69
The analysis of infeasibility plays an important role in solving satisfiability problems (SAT) and mixed integer programs (MIPs). In mixed integer programming, this procedure is called conflict analysis. So far, modern MIP solvers use conflict analysis only for propagation and improving the dual bound, i.e., fathoming nodes that cannot contain feasible solutions. In this short paper, we present a new approach which uses conflict information to improve the primal bound during a MIP solve. To derive new improving primal solutions we use a conflict driven diving heuristic called conflict diving that uses the information obtained by conflict analysis. Conflict diving pursues a twofold strategy. By using conflict information the new diving approach is guided into parts of the search space that are usually not explored by other diving heuristics. At the same time, conflict diving has a fail-fast-strategy to reduce the time spent if it cannot find a new primal solution. As a byproduct, additional valid conflict constraints can be derived, from which a MIP solver can gain benefit to improve the dual bound as well. To show the added-value of conflict diving within a MIP solver, conflict diving has been implemented within the non-commercial MIP solver SCIP. Experiments are carried out on general MIP instances from standard public test sets, like MIPLIB2010 or Cor@l.
17-58
PIPS-SBB is a distributed-memory parallel solver with a scalable data distribution paradigm. It is designed to solve MIPs with a dual-block angular structure, which is characteristic of deterministic-equivalent Stochastic Mixed-Integer Programs (SMIPs). In this paper, we present two different parallelizations of Branch & Bound (B&B), implementing both as extensions of PIPS-SBB, thus adding an additional layer of parallelism. In the first of the proposed frameworks, PIPS-PSBB, the coordination and load-balancing of the different optimization workers is done in a decentralized fashion. This new framework is designed to ensure all available cores are processing the most promising parts of the B&B tree. The second, ug[PIPS-SBB,MPI], is a parallel implementation using the Ubiquity Generator (UG), a universal framework for parallelizing B&B tree search that has been successfully applied to other MIP solvers. We show the effects of leveraging multiple levels of parallelism in potentially improving scaling performance beyond thousands of cores.
17-57
Generalized preprocessing techniques for Steiner tree and maximum-weight connected subgraph problems
(2017)
This article introduces new preprocessing techniques for the Steiner tree problem in graphs and one of its most popular relatives, the maximum-weight connected subgraph problem. Several of the techniques generalize previous results from the literature. The correctness of the new methods is shown, but also their NP-hardness is demonstrated. Despite this pessimistic worst-case complexity, several relaxations are discussed that are expected to allow for a strong practical efficiency of these techniques in strengthening both exact and heuristic solving approaches.
17-56
Primal heuristics play an important role in the solving of mixed integer programs (MIPs). They often provide good feasible solutions early in the solving process and help to solve instances to optimality faster. In this paper, we present a scheme for primal start heuristics that can be executed without previous knowledge of an LP solution or a previously found integer feasible solution. It uses global structures available within MIP solvers to iteratively fix integer variables and propagate these fixings. Thereby, fixings are determined based on the predicted impact they have on the subsequent domain propagation. If sufficiently many variables can be fixed that way, the resulting problem is solved as an LP and the solution is rounded. If the rounded solution did not provide a feasible solution already, a sub-MIP is solved for the neighborhood defined by the variable fixings performed in the first phase. The global structures help to define a neighborhood that is with high probability significantly easier to process while (hopefully) still containing good feasible solutions. We present three primal heuristics that use this scheme based on different global structures. Our computational experiments on standard MIP test sets show that the proposed heuristics find solutions for about three out of five instances and therewith help to improve several performance measures for MIP solvers, including the primal integral and the average solving time.
17-34
Branching rules are an integral component of the branch-and-bound algorithm typically used to solve mixed-integer programs and subject to intense research. Different approaches for branching are typically compared based on the solving time as well as the size of the branch-and-bound tree needed to prove optimality. The latter, however, has some flaws when it comes to sophisticated branching rules that do not only try to take a good branching decision, but have additional side-effects. We propose a new measure for the quality of a branching rule that distinguishes tree size reductions obtained by better branching decisions from those obtained by such side-effects. It is evaluated for common branching rules providing new insights in the importance of strong branching.
17-45
Borne out of a surprising variety of practical applications, the maximum-weight connected subgraph problem has attracted considerable interest during the past years. This interest has not only led to notable research on theoretical properties, but has also brought about several (exact) solvers-with steadily increasing performance. Continuing along this path, the following article introduces several new algorithms such as reduction techniques and heuristics and describes their integration into an exact solver.
The new methods are evaluated with respect to both their theoretical and practical properties. Notably, the new exact framework allows to solve common problem instances from the literature faster than all previous approaches. Moreover, one large-scale benchmark instance from the 11th DIMACS Challenge can be solved for the first time to optimality and the primal-dual gap for two other ones can be significantly reduced.
17-43
We investigate how the numerical properties of the LP relaxations evolve
throughout the solution procedure in a solver employing the branch-and-cut
algorithm. The long-term goal of this work is to determine whether the effect
on the numerical conditioning of the LP relaxations resulting from the
branching and cutting operations can be effectively predicted
and whether such predictions can be used to make better algorithmic
choices. In a first step towards this goal, we discuss here the numerical
behavior of an existing solver in order to determine whether our
intuitive understanding of this behavior is correct.
17-40
We consider the problem of pattern detection in large scale
railway timetables. This problem arises in rolling stock optimization planning
in order to identify invariant sections of the timetable for
which a cyclic rotation plan is adequate.
We propose a dual reduction technique which leads to an decomposition
and enumeration method. Computational results for real
world instances demonstrate that the method is able to
produce optimal solutions as fast as standard MIP solvers.