Polyhedral Properties of RLT Relaxations of Nonconvex Quadratic Programs and Their Implications on Exact Relaxations

We study linear programming relaxations of nonconvex quadratic programs given by the reformulation-linearization technique (RLT), referred to as RLT relaxations. We investigate the relations between the polyhedral properties of the feasible regions of a quadratic program and its RLT relaxation. We establish various connections between recession directions, boundedness, and vertices of the two feasible regions. Using these properties, we present necessary and sufficient exactness conditions for RLT relaxations. We then give a thorough discussion of how our results can be converted into simple algorithmic procedures to construct instances of quadratic programs with exact, inexact, or unbounded RLT relaxations.Comment: Technical Report, School of Mathematics, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH9 3FD, Scotland, United Kingdo

On Tractable Convex Relaxations of Standard Quadratic Optimization Problems under Sparsity Constraints

Standard quadratic optimization problems (StQPs) provide a versatile modelling tool in various applications. In this paper, we consider StQPs with a hard sparsity constraint, referred to as sparse StQPs. We focus on various tractable convex relaxations of sparse StQPs arising from a mixed-binary quadratic formulation, namely, the linear optimization relaxation given by the reformulation-linearization technique, the Shor relaxation, and the relaxation resulting from their combination. We establish several structural properties of these relaxations in relation to the corresponding relaxations of StQPs without any sparsity constraints, and pay particular attention to the rank-one feasible solutions retained by these relaxations. We then utilize these relations to establish several results about the quality of the lower bounds arising from different relaxations. We also present several conditions that ensure the exactness of each relaxation.Comment: Technical Report, School of Mathematics, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH9 3FD, Scotland, United Kingdo

Operational Research: Methods and Applications

Throughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include a variety of methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a diverse and wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first aims to summarise the up-to-date knowledge and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion. It should be used as a point of reference or first-port-of-call for a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order. The authors dedicate this paper to the 2023 Turkey/Syria earthquake victims. We sincerely hope that advances in OR will play a role towards minimising the pain and suffering caused by this and future catastrophes

A unifying optimal partition approach to sensitivity analysis in conic optimization

Abstract We study convex conic optimization problems in which the right-hand side and the cost vectors vary linearly as a function of a scalar parameter. We present a unifying geometric framework that subsumes the concept of the optimal partition in linear programming (LP) and semidefinite programming (SDP) and extends it to conic optimization. Similar to the optimal partition approach to sensitivity analysis in LP and SDP, the range of perturbations for which the optimal partition remains constant can be computed by solving two conic optimization problems. Under a weaker notion of * Revised version of the former technical report "On Sensitivity Analysis in Conic Programming" dated October 22, 2001. † Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-3600, USA. The author is supported in part by NSF through CAREER grant DMI-0237415. ([email protected]) 1 nondegeneracy, this range is simply given by a minimum ratio test. We briefly discuss the properties of the optimal value function under such perturbations

On the minimum volume covering ellipsoid of ellipsoids

We study the problem of computing a (1+ɛ)-approximation to the minimum volume covering ellipsoid of a given set S of the convex hull of m full-dimensional ellipsoids in R n. We extend the first-order algorithm of Kumar and Yıldırım that computes an approximation to the minimum volume covering ellipsoid of a finite set of points in R n, which, in turn, is a modification of Khachiyan’s algorithm. For fixed ɛ> 0, we establish a polynomial-time complexity, which is linear in the number of ellipsoids m. In particular, the iteration complexity of our algorithm is identical to that for a set of m points. The main ingredient in our analysis is the extension of polynomialtime complexity of certain subroutines in the algorithm from a set of points to a set of ellipsoids. As a byproduct, our algorithm returns a finite “core ” set X ⊆ S with the property that the minimum volume covering ellipsoid of X provides a good approximation to that of S. Furthermore, the size of X depends only on the dimension n and ɛ, but not on the number of ellipsoids m. We also discuss the extent to which our algorithm can be used to compute the minimum volume covering ellipsoid of the convex hull of other sets in R n. We adopt the real number model of computation in our analysis