970 research outputs found
Bin Packing and Related Problems: General Arc-flow Formulation with Graph Compression
We present an exact method, based on an arc-flow formulation with side
constraints, for solving bin packing and cutting stock problems --- including
multi-constraint variants --- by simply representing all the patterns in a very
compact graph. Our method includes a graph compression algorithm that usually
reduces the size of the underlying graph substantially without weakening the
model. As opposed to our method, which provides strong models, conventional
models are usually highly symmetric and provide very weak lower bounds.
Our formulation is equivalent to Gilmore and Gomory's, thus providing a very
strong linear relaxation. However, instead of using column-generation in an
iterative process, the method constructs a graph, where paths from the source
to the target node represent every valid packing pattern.
The same method, without any problem-specific parameterization, was used to
solve a large variety of instances from several different cutting and packing
problems. In this paper, we deal with vector packing, graph coloring, bin
packing, cutting stock, cardinality constrained bin packing, cutting stock with
cutting knife limitation, cutting stock with binary patterns, bin packing with
conflicts, and cutting stock with binary patterns and forbidden pairs. We
report computational results obtained with many benchmark test data sets, all
of them showing a large advantage of this formulation with respect to the
traditional ones
Collocation Games and Their Application to Distributed Resource Management
We introduce Collocation Games as the basis of a general framework for modeling, analyzing, and facilitating the interactions between the various stakeholders in distributed systems in general, and in cloud computing environments in particular. Cloud computing enables fixed-capacity (processing, communication, and storage) resources to be offered by infrastructure providers as commodities for sale at a fixed cost in an open marketplace to independent, rational parties (players) interested in setting up their own applications over the Internet. Virtualization technologies enable the partitioning of such fixed-capacity resources so as to allow each player to dynamically acquire appropriate fractions of the resources for unencumbered use. In such a paradigm, the resource management problem reduces to that of partitioning the entire set of applications (players) into subsets, each of which is assigned to fixed-capacity cloud resources. If the infrastructure and the various applications are under a single administrative domain, this partitioning reduces to an optimization problem whose objective is to minimize the overall deployment cost. In a marketplace, in which the infrastructure provider is interested in maximizing its own profit, and in which each player is interested in minimizing its own cost, it should be evident that a global optimization is precisely the wrong framework. Rather, in this paper we use a game-theoretic framework in which the assignment of players to fixed-capacity resources is the outcome of a strategic "Collocation Game". Although we show that determining the existence of an equilibrium for collocation games in general is NP-hard, we present a number of simplified, practically-motivated variants of the collocation game for which we establish convergence to a Nash Equilibrium, and for which we derive convergence and price of anarchy bounds. In addition to these analytical results, we present an experimental evaluation of implementations of some of these variants for cloud infrastructures consisting of a collection of multidimensional resources of homogeneous or heterogeneous capacities. Experimental results using trace-driven simulations and synthetically generated datasets corroborate our analytical results and also illustrate how collocation games offer a feasible distributed resource management alternative for autonomic/self-organizing systems, in which the adoption of a global optimization approach (centralized or distributed) would be neither practical nor justifiable.NSF (CCF-0820138, CSR-0720604, EFRI-0735974, CNS-0524477, CNS-052016, CCR-0635102); Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana; COLCIENCIAS–Instituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia y la Tecnología "Francisco José de Caldas
Orbitopal Fixing
The topic of this paper are integer programming models in which a subset of
0/1-variables encode a partitioning of a set of objects into disjoint subsets.
Such models can be surprisingly hard to solve by branch-and-cut algorithms if
the order of the subsets of the partition is irrelevant, since this kind of
symmetry unnecessarily blows up the search tree. We present a general tool,
called orbitopal fixing, for enhancing the capabilities of branch-and-cut
algorithms in solving such symmetric integer programming models. We devise a
linear time algorithm that, applied at each node of the search tree, removes
redundant parts of the tree produced by the above mentioned symmetry. The
method relies on certain polyhedra, called orbitopes, which have been
introduced bei Kaibel and Pfetsch (Math. Programm. A, 114 (2008), 1-36). It
does, however, not explicitly add inequalities to the model. Instead, it uses
certain fixing rules for variables. We demonstrate the computational power of
orbitopal fixing at the example of a graph partitioning problem.Comment: 22 pages, revised and extended version of a previous version that has
appeared under the same title in Proc. IPCO 200
Budget-constrained Edge Service Provisioning with Demand Estimation via Bandit Learning
Shared edge computing platforms, which enable Application Service Providers
(ASPs) to deploy applications in close proximity to mobile users are providing
ultra-low latency and location-awareness to a rich portfolio of services.
Though ubiquitous edge service provisioning, i.e., deploying the application at
all possible edge sites, is always preferable, it is impractical due to often
limited operational budget of ASPs. In this case, an ASP has to cautiously
decide where to deploy the edge service and how much budget it is willing to
use. A central issue here is that the service demand received by each edge
site, which is the key factor of deploying benefit, is unknown to ASPs a
priori. What's more complicated is that this demand pattern varies temporally
and spatially across geographically distributed edge sites. In this paper, we
investigate an edge resource rental problem where the ASP learns service demand
patterns for individual edge sites while renting computation resource at these
sites to host its applications for edge service provisioning. An online
algorithm, called Context-aware Online Edge Resource Rental (COERR), is
proposed based on the framework of Contextual Combinatorial Multi-armed Bandit
(CC-MAB). COERR observes side-information (context) to learn the demand
patterns of edge sites and decides rental decisions (including where to rent
the computation resource and how much to rent) to maximize ASP's utility given
a limited budget. COERR provides a provable performance achieving sublinear
regret compared to an Oracle algorithm that knows exactly the expected service
demand of edge sites. Experiments are carried out on a real-world dataset and
the results show that COERR significantly outperforms other benchmarks
Facets of conflict hypergraphs
We study the facial structure of the independent set polytope using the concept of conflict hypergraphs. A conflict hypergraph is a hypergraph whose vertices correspond to the binary variables, and edges correspond to covers in the constraint matrix of the independent set polytope. Various structures such as cliques, odd holes, odd anti-holes, webs and anti-webs are identified on the conflict hypergraph. These hypergraph structures are shown to be generalization of traditional graph structures. Valid inequalities are derived from these hypergraph structures, and the facet defining conditions are studied. Chvatal-Gomory ranks are derived for odd hole and clique inequalities. To test the hypergraph cuts, we conduct computational experiments on market-share (also referred to as market-split) problems. These instances consist of 100% dense multiple-knapsack constraints. They are small in size but are extremely hard to solve by traditional means. Their difficult nature is attributed mainly to the dense and symmetrical structure. We employ a special branching strategy in combination with the hypergraph inequalities to solve many of the particularly difficult instances. Results are reported for serial as well as parallel implementations.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Lee, Eva K.; Committee Member: Barnes, Earl; Committee Member: Johnson, Ellis; Committee Member: Parker, R. Gary; Committee Member: Wu, D. J
- …