Piecewise Polyhedral Formulations for a Multilinear Term

Abstract

In this paper, we present a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation of a piecewise, polyhedral relaxation (PPR) of a multilinear term using its convex hull representation. Based on the solution of the PPR, we also present a MILP formulation whose solutions are feasible for nonconvex, multilinear equations. We then present computational results showing the effectiveness of proposed formulations on instances of standard benchmarks of nonlinear programs (NLPs) with multilinear terms and compare the proposed formulation with a traditional formulation that is built by recursively relaxing bilinear groupings of multilinear terms.