An unconstrained convex programming approach to solving convex quadratic programming problems

In this paper, we derive an unconstrained convex programming approach to solving convex quadratic programming problems in standard form. Related duality theory is established by using two simple inequalities. An ?-optimal solution is obtained by solving an unconstrained dual convex program. A dual-to-primal conversion formula is also provided. Some preliminary computational results of using a curved search method is included     

An entropy based central cutting plane algorithm for convex min-max semi-infinite programming problems

In this paper,we present a central cutting plane algorithm for solving convex min-max semi-infinite programming problems.Because the objective function here is non-differentiable,we apply a smoothing technique to the considered problem and develop an algorithm based on the entropy function.It is shown that the global convergence of the proposed algorithm can be obtained under weaker conditions.Some numerical results are presented to show the potential of the proposed algorithm.     

An approximation algorithm for cutting out convex polygons

We provide an O(logn)-approximation algorithm for the following problem. Given a convex n-gon P, drawn on a convex piece of paper, cut P out of the piece of paper in the cheapest possible way. No polynomial-time approximation algorithm was known for this problem posed in 1985.     

L-shaped algorithm for two stage problems of stochastic convex programming

In this paper we study two stage problems of stochastic convex programming. Solving the problems is very hard. A L-shaped method for it is given. The implement of the algorithm is simple, so less computation work is needed. The result of computation shows that the algorithm is effective.     

Primal-dual proximal point algorithm for linearly constrained convex programming problems

A primal-dual version of the proximal point algorithm is developed for linearly constrained convex programming problems. The algorithm is an iterative method to find a saddle point of the Lagrangian of the problem. At each iteration of the algorithm, we compute an approximate saddle point of the Lagrangian function augmented by quadratic proximal terms of both primal and dual variables. Specifically, we first minimize the function with respect to the primal variables and then approximately maximize the resulting function of the dual variables. The merit of this approach exists in the fact that the latter function is differentiable and the maximization of this function is subject to no constraints. We discuss convergence properties of the algorithm and report some numerical results for network flow problems with separable quadratic costs.     

An algorithm for nonconvex programming problems

Branch and bound approaches for nonconvex programming problems had been given in [1] and [4]. Crucial for both are the use of rectangular partitions, convex envelopes and separable nonconvex portions of the objective function and constraints. We want to propose a similar algorithm which solves a sequence of problems in each of which the objective function is convex or even linear. The main difference between this approach and previous approaches is the use of general compact partitions instead of rectangular ones and a different refining rule such that the algorithm does not rely on the concept of convex envelopes and handles non-separable functions.First we describe a general algorithm and prove a convergence theorem under suitable regularity assumptions. Then we give as example an algorithm for concave minimization problems.     

An exterior point polynomial-time algorithm for convex quadratic programming

In this paper an exterior point polynomial time algorithm for convex quadratic programming problems is proposed. We convert a convex quadratic program into an unconstrained convex program problem with a self-concordant objective function. We show that, only with duality, the Path-following method is valid. The computational complexity analysis of the algorithm is given.     

An effective branch-and-bound algorithm for convex quadratic integer programming

We present a branch-and-bound algorithm for minimizing a convex quadratic objective function over integer variables subject to convex constraints. In a given node of the enumeration tree, corresponding to the fixing of a subset of the variables, a lower bound is given by the continuous minimum of the restricted objective function. We improve this bound by exploiting the integrality of the variables using suitably-defined lattice-free ellipsoids. Experiments show that our approach is very fast on both unconstrained problems and problems with box constraints. The main reason is that all expensive calculations can be done in a preprocessing phase, while a single node in the enumeration tree can be processed in linear time in the problem dimension.     

An eigenvalue decomposition based branch-and-bound algorithm for nonconvex quadratic programming problems with convex quadratic constraints

In this paper, we propose a branch-and-bound algorithm for finding a global optimal solution for a nonconvex quadratic program with convex quadratic constraints (NQPCQC). We first reformulate NQPCQC by adding some nonconvex quadratic constraints induced by eigenvectors of negative eigenvalues associated with the nonconvex quadratic objective function to Shor’s semidefinite relaxation. Under the assumption of having a bounded feasible domain, these nonconvex quadratic constraints can be further relaxed into linear ones to form a special semidefinite programming relaxation. Then an efficient branch-and-bound algorithm branching along the eigendirections of negative eigenvalues is designed. The theoretic convergence property and the worst-case complexity of the proposed algorithm are proved. Numerical experiments are conducted on several types of quadratic programs to show the efficiency of the proposed method.     

A path following algorithm for a class of convex programming problems

We present a primal-dual path following interior algorithm for a class of linearly constrained convex programming problems with non-negative decision variables. We introduce the definition of a Scaled Lipschitz Condition and show that if the objective function satisfies the Scaled Lipschitz Condition then, at each iteration, our algorithm reduces the duality gap by at least a factor of (1–/n), where is positive and depends on the curvature of the objective function, by means of solving a system of linear equations which requires no more than O(n³) arithmetic operations. The class of functions having the Scaled Lipschitz Condition includes linear, convex quadratic and entropy functions.     

An effective linear approximation method for separable programming problems

Among the numerous applications of piecewise linearization methods include data fitting, network analysis, logistics, and statistics. In the early 1950s, a concave function was found to be able to be linearized by introducing 0-1 variables. Most textbooks in Operations Research offer such methods for expressing linear approximations. Various methods of linearization have also been developed in recent literature. Nevertheless, the transformed linear scheme has a severe shortcoming: most standard procedures for linearizing typically involve a large increase in the number of binary variables. Consequently, the gains to be derived from dealing with linear functions are quite likely to be nullified by the increase in the size of the problem.Conventional methods for linearizing a concave function with m break points require m-1 binary variables. However, when m becomes large, the computation will be very time-consuming and may cause a heavy computational burden.This study proposes an effective approach in which only ⌈log₂(m-1)⌉ binary variables are used. The proposed method has the following features: (i) it offers more convenient and efficient means of expressing a piecewise linear function; (ii) fewer 0-1 variables are used; (iii) the computational results show that the proposed method is much more efficient and faster than the conventional one, especially when the number of break points becomes large.     

A constraint shifting homotopy method for convex multi-objective programming

In this paper, a constraint shifting combined homotopy method for solving multi-objective programming problems with both equality and inequality constraints is presented. It does not need the starting point to be an interior point or a feasible point and hence is convenient to use. Under some assumptions, the existence and convergence of a smooth path to an efficient solution are proven. Simple numerical results are given.     

A redundancy detection algorithm for fuzzy stochastic multi-objective linear fractional programming problems

The computational complexity of linear and nonlinear programming problems depends on the number of objective functions and constraints involved and solving a large problem often becomes a difficult task. Redundancy detection and elimination provides a suitable tool for reducing this complexity and simplifying a linear or nonlinear programming problem while maintaining the essential properties of the original system. Although a large number of redundancy detection methods have been proposed to simplify linear and nonlinear stochastic programming problems, very little research has been developed for fuzzy stochastic (FS) fractional programming problems. We propose an algorithm that allows to simultaneously detect both redundant objective function(s) and redundant constraint(s) in FS multi-objective linear fractional programming problems. More precisely, our algorithm reduces the number of linear fuzzy fractional objective functions by transforming them in probabilistic–possibilistic constraints characterized by predetermined confidence levels. We present two numerical examples to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed algorithm and exhibit its efficacy.     

An approximation algorithm for indefinite mixed integer quadratic programming

Mathematical Programming - In this paper, we give an algorithm that finds an $$epsilon $$ -approximate solution to a mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) problem. The algorithm runs in...     

A constraint shifting homotopy method for convex multi-objective programming

In this paper, a constraint shifting combined homotopy method for solving multi-objective programming problems with both equality and inequality constraints is presented. It does not need the starting point to be an interior point or a feasible point and hence is convenient to use. Under some assumptions, the existence and convergence of a smooth path to an efficient solution are proven. Simple numerical results are given.     

Fast approximation schemes for Boolean programming and scheduling problems related to positive convex Half-Product

We address a version of the Half-Product Problem and its restricted variant with a linear knapsack constraint. For these minimization problems of Boolean programming, we focus on the development of fully polynomial-time approximation schemes with running times that depend quadratically on the number of variables. Applications to various single machine scheduling problems are reported: minimizing the total weighted flow time with controllable processing times, minimizing the makespan with controllable release dates, minimizing the total weighted flow time for two models of scheduling with rejection.     

An extension of Karmarkar's projective algorithm for convex quadratic programming

We present an extension of Karmarkar's linear programming algorithm for solving a more general group of optimization problems: convex quadratic programs. This extension is based on the iterated application of the objective augmentation and the projective transformation, followed by optimization over an inscribing ellipsoid centered at the current solution. It creates a sequence of interior feasible points that converge to the optimal feasible solution in O(Ln) iterations; each iteration can be computed in O(Ln ³) arithmetic operations, wheren is the number of variables andL is the number of bits in the input. In this paper, we emphasize its convergence property, practical efficiency, and relation to the ellipsoid method.     

Convergence property of the Iri-Imai algorithm for some smooth convex programming problems

In this paper, the Iri-Imai algorithm for solving linear and convex quadratic programming is extended to solve some other smooth convex programming problems. The globally linear convergence rate of this extended algorithm is proved, under the condition that the objective and constraint functions satisfy a certain type of convexity, called the harmonic convexity in this paper. A characterization of this convexity condition is given. The same convexity condition was used by Mehrotra and Sun to prove the convergence of a path-following algorithm.The Iri-Imai algorithm is a natural generalization of the original Newton algorithm to constrained convex programming. Other known convergent interior-point algorithms for smooth convex programming are mainly based on the path-following approach.     

Solving convex quadratic bilevel programming problems using an enumeration sequential quadratic programming algorithm

In this paper, we present an original method to solve convex bilevel programming problems in an optimistic approach. Both upper and lower level objective functions are convex and the feasible region is a polyhedron. The enumeration sequential linear programming algorithm uses primal and dual monotonicity properties of the primal and dual lower level objective functions and constraints within an enumeration frame work. New optimality conditions are given, expressed in terms of tightness of the constraints of lower level problem. These optimality conditions are used at each step of our algorithm to compute an improving rational solution within some indexes of lower level primal-dual variables and monotonicity networks as well. Some preliminary computational results are reported.