19,200 research outputs found
A Finite-Time Cutting Plane Algorithm for Distributed Mixed Integer Linear Programming
Many problems of interest for cyber-physical network systems can be
formulated as Mixed Integer Linear Programs in which the constraints are
distributed among the agents. In this paper we propose a distributed algorithm
to solve this class of optimization problems in a peer-to-peer network with no
coordinator and with limited computation and communication capabilities. In the
proposed algorithm, at each communication round, agents solve locally a small
LP, generate suitable cutting planes, namely intersection cuts and cost-based
cuts, and communicate a fixed number of active constraints, i.e., a candidate
optimal basis. We prove that, if the cost is integer, the algorithm converges
to the lexicographically minimal optimal solution in a finite number of
communication rounds. Finally, through numerical computations, we analyze the
algorithm convergence as a function of the network size.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure
Bicriteria data compression
The advent of massive datasets (and the consequent design of high-performing
distributed storage systems) have reignited the interest of the scientific and
engineering community towards the design of lossless data compressors which
achieve effective compression ratio and very efficient decompression speed.
Lempel-Ziv's LZ77 algorithm is the de facto choice in this scenario because of
its decompression speed and its flexibility in trading decompression speed
versus compressed-space efficiency. Each of the existing implementations offers
a trade-off between space occupancy and decompression speed, so software
engineers have to content themselves by picking the one which comes closer to
the requirements of the application in their hands. Starting from these
premises, and for the first time in the literature, we address in this paper
the problem of trading optimally, and in a principled way, the consumption of
these two resources by introducing the Bicriteria LZ77-Parsing problem, which
formalizes in a principled way what data-compressors have traditionally
approached by means of heuristics. The goal is to determine an LZ77 parsing
which minimizes the space occupancy in bits of the compressed file, provided
that the decompression time is bounded by a fixed amount (or vice-versa). This
way, the software engineer can set its space (or time) requirements and then
derive the LZ77 parsing which optimizes the decompression speed (or the space
occupancy, respectively). We solve this problem efficiently in O(n log^2 n)
time and optimal linear space within a small, additive approximation, by
proving and deploying some specific structural properties of the weighted graph
derived from the possible LZ77-parsings of the input file. The preliminary set
of experiments shows that our novel proposal dominates all the highly
engineered competitors, hence offering a win-win situation in theory&practice
Algorithm Engineering in Robust Optimization
Robust optimization is a young and emerging field of research having received
a considerable increase of interest over the last decade. In this paper, we
argue that the the algorithm engineering methodology fits very well to the
field of robust optimization and yields a rewarding new perspective on both the
current state of research and open research directions.
To this end we go through the algorithm engineering cycle of design and
analysis of concepts, development and implementation of algorithms, and
theoretical and experimental evaluation. We show that many ideas of algorithm
engineering have already been applied in publications on robust optimization.
Most work on robust optimization is devoted to analysis of the concepts and the
development of algorithms, some papers deal with the evaluation of a particular
concept in case studies, and work on comparison of concepts just starts. What
is still a drawback in many papers on robustness is the missing link to include
the results of the experiments again in the design
Matrix Minor Reformulation and SOCP-based Spatial Branch-and-Cut Method for the AC Optimal Power Flow Problem
Alternating current optimal power flow (AC OPF) is one of the most
fundamental optimization problems in electrical power systems. It can be
formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP) with rank constraints. Solving AC
OPF, that is, obtaining near optimal primal solutions as well as high quality
dual bounds for this non-convex program, presents a major computational
challenge to today's power industry for the real-time operation of large-scale
power grids. In this paper, we propose a new technique for reformulation of the
rank constraints using both principal and non-principal 2-by-2 minors of the
involved Hermitian matrix variable and characterize all such minors into three
types. We show the equivalence of these minor constraints to the physical
constraints of voltage angle differences summing to zero over three- and
four-cycles in the power network. We study second-order conic programming
(SOCP) relaxations of this minor reformulation and propose strong cutting
planes, convex envelopes, and bound tightening techniques to strengthen the
resulting SOCP relaxations. We then propose an SOCP-based spatial
branch-and-cut method to obtain the global optimum of AC OPF. Extensive
computational experiments show that the proposed algorithm significantly
outperforms the state-of-the-art SDP-based OPF solver and on a simple personal
computer is able to obtain on average a 0.71% optimality gap in no more than
720 seconds for the most challenging power system instances in the literature
A Scalable Algorithm For Sparse Portfolio Selection
The sparse portfolio selection problem is one of the most famous and
frequently-studied problems in the optimization and financial economics
literatures. In a universe of risky assets, the goal is to construct a
portfolio with maximal expected return and minimum variance, subject to an
upper bound on the number of positions, linear inequalities and minimum
investment constraints. Existing certifiably optimal approaches to this problem
do not converge within a practical amount of time at real world problem sizes
with more than 400 securities. In this paper, we propose a more scalable
approach. By imposing a ridge regularization term, we reformulate the problem
as a convex binary optimization problem, which is solvable via an efficient
outer-approximation procedure. We propose various techniques for improving the
performance of the procedure, including a heuristic which supplies high-quality
warm-starts, a preprocessing technique for decreasing the gap at the root node,
and an analytic technique for strengthening our cuts. We also study the
problem's Boolean relaxation, establish that it is second-order-cone
representable, and supply a sufficient condition for its tightness. In
numerical experiments, we establish that the outer-approximation procedure
gives rise to dramatic speedups for sparse portfolio selection problems.Comment: Submitted to INFORMS Journal on Computin
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