Strong formulations for the pooling problem

The pooling problem is a well-studied global optimization problem with applications in oil refining and petrochemical industry. Despite the strong NP-hardness of the problem, which is proved formally in this paper, most instances from the literature have recently been solved efficiently by use of strong formulations. The main contribution from this paper is a new formulation that proves to be stronger than other formulations based on proportion variables. Moreover, we propose a promising branching strategy for the new formulation and provide computational experiments confirming the strength of the new formulation and the effectiveness of the branching strategy.