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Capacitated Network Design—Polyhedral Structure and Computation

We study a capacity expansion problem that arises in telecommunication network design. Given a capacitated network and a traffic demand matrix, the objective is to add capacity to the edges, in multiples of various modularities, and route traffic, so that the overall cost is minimized. We study the polyhedral structure of a mixed-integer formulation of the problem and develop a cutting-plane algorithm using facet defining inequalities. The algorithm produces an extended formulation providing both a vary good lower bound and a starting point for branch and bound. The overall algorithm appears effective when applied to problem instances using real-life data.

Mixing mixed-integer inequalities

Abstract.Mixed-integer rounding (MIR) inequalities play a central role in the development of strong cutting planes for mixed-integer programs. In this paper, we investigate how known MIR inequalities can be combined in order to generate new strong valid inequalities.¶Given a mixed-integer region S and a collection of valid “base” mixed-integer inequalities, we develop a procedure for generating new valid inequalities for S. The starting point of our procedure is to consider the MIR inequalities related with the base inequalities. For any subset of these MIR inequalities, we generate two new inequalities by combining or “mixing” them. We show that the new inequalities are strong in the sense that they fully describe the convex hull of a special mixed-integer region associated with the base inequalities.¶We discuss how the mixing procedure can be used to obtain new classes of strong valid inequalities for various mixed-integer programming problems. In particular, we present examples for production planning, capacitated facility location, capacitated network design, and multiple knapsack problems. We also present preliminary computational results using the mixing procedure to tighten the formulation of some difficult integer programs. Finally we study some extensions of this mixing procedure.

Computational experience with a difficult mixed-integer multicommodity flow problem

The following problem arises in the study of lightwave networks. Given a demand matrix containing amounts to be routed between corresponding nodes, we wish to design a network with certain topological features, and in this network, route all the demands, so that the maximum load (total flow) on any edge is minimized. As we show, even small instances of this combined design/routing problem are extremely intractable. We describe computational experience with a cutting plane algorithm for this problem.

Valid inequalities based on simple mixed-integer sets

In this paper we use facets of simple mixed-integer sets with three variables to derive a parametric family of valid inequalities for general mixed-integer sets. We call these inequalities two-step MIR inequalities as they can be derived by applying the simple mixed-integer rounding (MIR) principle of Wolsey (1998) twice. The two-step MIR inequalities define facets of the master cyclic group polyhedron of Gomory (1969). In addition, they dominate the strong fractional cuts of Letchford and Lodi (2002).

MIR closures of polyhedral sets

We study the mixed-integer rounding (MIR) closures of polyhedral sets. The MIR closure of a polyhedral set is equal to its split closure and the associated separation problem is NP-hard. We describe a mixed-integer programming (MIP) model with linear constraints and a non-linear objective for separating an arbitrary point from the MIR closure of a given mixed-integer set. We linearize the objective using additional variables to produce a linear MIP model that solves the separation problem exactly. Using a subset of these additional variables yields an MIP model which solves the separation problem approximately, with an accuracy that depends on the number of additional variables used. Our analysis yields an alternative proof of the result of Cook et al. (1990) that the split closure of a polyhedral set is again a polyhedron. We also discuss a heuristic to obtain MIR cuts based on our approximate separation model, and present some computational results.

Perspective Reformulation and Applications

In this paper we survey recent work on the perspective reformulation approach that generates tight, tractable relaxations for convex mixed integer nonlin- ear programs (MINLP)s. This preprocessing technique is applicable to cases where the MINLP contains binary indicator variables that force continuous decision variables to take the value 0, or to belong to a convex set. We derive from first principles the perspective reformulation, and we discuss a variety of practical MINLPs whose relaxation can be strengthened via the perspective reformulation. The survey concludes with comments and computations comparing various algorithmic techniques for solving perspective reformulations.

A model for fusion and code motion in an automatic parallelizing compiler

Loop fusion has been studied extensively, but in a manner isolated from other transformations. This was mainly due to the lack of a powerful intermediate representation for application of compositions of high-level transformations. Fusion presents strong interactions with parallelism and locality. Currently, there exist no models to determine good fusion structures integrated with all components of an auto-parallelizing compiler. This is also one of the reasons why all the benefits of optimization and automatic parallelization of long sequences of loop nests spanning hundreds of lines of code have never been explored. We present a fusion model in an integrated automatic parallelization framework that simultaneously optimizes for hardware prefetch stream buffer utilization, locality, and parallelism. Characterizing the legal space of fusion structures in the polyhedral compiler framework is not difficult. However, incorporating useful optimization criteria into such a legal space to pick good fusion structures is very hard. The model we propose captures utilization of hardware prefetch streams, loss of parallelism, as well as constraints imposed by privatization and code expansion into a single convex optimization space. The model scales very well to program sections spanning hundreds of lines of code. It has been implemented into the polyhedral pass of the IBM XL optimizing compiler. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness in finding good fusion structures for codes including SPEC benchmarks and large applications. An improvement ranging from 5% to nearly a factor of 2.75× is obtained over the current production compiler optimizer on these benchmarks.

On the MIR Closure of Polyhedra

We study the mixed-integer rounding (MIR) closure of polyhedra. The MIR closure of a polyhedron is equal to its split closure and the associated separation problem is NP-hard. We describe a mixed-integer programming (MIP) model with linear constraints and a non-linear objective for separating an arbitrary point from the MIR closure of a given mixed-integer set. We linearize the objective using additional variables to produce a linear MIP model that solves the separation problem approximately, with an accuracy that depends on the number of additional variables used. Our analysis yields a short proof of the result of Cook, Kannan and Schrijver (1990) that the split closure of a polyhedron is again a polyhedron. We also present some computational results with our approximate separation model.

Two dimensional lattice-free cuts and asymmetric disjunctions for mixed-integer polyhedra

In this paper, we study the relationship between 2D lattice-free cuts, the family of cuts obtained by taking two-row relaxations of a mixed-integer program (MIP) and applying intersection cuts based on maximal lattice-free sets in