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  • 2015-2019  (17)
  • 2010-2014  (6)
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  • 11
    Publication Date: 2020-08-05
    Description: Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) heuristics are among the most powerful but also most expensive heuristics for mixed integer programs (MIP). Ideally, a solver learns adaptively which LNS heuristics work best for the MIP problem at hand in order to concentrate its limited computational budget. To this end, this work introduces Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) for MIP, a primal heuristic that acts a framework for eight popular LNS heuristics such as Local Branching and Relaxation Induced Neighborhood Search (RINS). We distinguish the available LNS heuristics by their individual search domains, which we call neighborhoods. The decision which neighborhood should be executed is guided by selection strategies for the multi armed bandit problem, a related optimization problem during which suitable actions have to be chosen to maximize a reward function. In this paper, we propose an LNS-specific reward function to learn to distinguish between the available neighborhoods based on successful calls and failures. A second, algorithmic enhancement is a generic variable fixing priorization, which ALNS employs to adjust the subproblem complexity as needed. This is particularly useful for some neighborhoods which do not fix variables by themselves. The proposed primal heuristic has been implemented within the MIP solver SCIP. An extensive computational study is conducted to compare different LNS strategies within our ALNS framework on a large set of publicly available MIP instances from the MIPLIB and Coral benchmark sets. The results of this simulation are used to calibrate the parameters of the bandit selection strategies. A second computational experiment shows the computational benefits of the proposed ALNS framework within the MIP solver SCIP.
    Language: English
    Type: article , doc-type:article
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  • 12
    Publication Date: 2022-03-14
    Description: Primal heuristics are an important component of state-of-the-art codes for mixed integer programming. In this paper, we focus on primal heuristics that only employ computationally inexpensive procedures such as rounding and logical deductions (propagation). We give an overview of eight different approaches. To assess the impact of these primal heuristics on the ability to find feasible solutions, in particular early during search, we introduce a new performance measure, the primal integral. Computational experiments evaluate this and other measures on MIPLIB~2010 benchmark instances.
    Language: English
    Type: reportzib , doc-type:preprint
    Format: application/pdf
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  • 13
    Publication Date: 2020-08-05
    Description: The selection of a good branching variable is crucial for small search trees in Mixed Integer Programming. Most modern solvers employ a strategy guided by history information, mainly the variable pseudo-costs, which are used to estimate the objective gain. At the beginning of the search, such information is usually collected via an expensive look-ahead strategy called strong branching until variables are considered reliable. The reliability notion is thereby mostly based on fixed-number thresholds, which may lead to ineffective branching decisions on problems with highly varying objective gains. We suggest two new notions of reliability motivated by mathematical statistics that take into account the sample variance of the past observations on each variable individually. The first method prioritizes additional strong branching look-aheads on variables whose pseudo-costs show a large variance by measuring the relative error of a pseudo-cost confidence interval. The second method performs a specialized version of a two-sample Student’s t -test for filtering branching candidates with a high probability to be better than the best history candidate. Both methods were implemented in the MIP-solver SCIP and computational results on standard MIP test sets are presented.
    Language: English
    Type: conferenceobject , doc-type:conferenceObject
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  • 14
    Publication Date: 2020-08-05
    Description: The selection of a good branching variable is crucial for small search trees in Mixed Integer Programming. Most modern solvers employ a strategy guided by history information, mainly the variable pseudo-costs, which are used to estimate the objective gain. At the beginning of the search, such information is usually collected via an expensive look-ahead strategy called strong-branching until variables are considered reliable. The reliability notion is thereby mostly based on fixed-number thresholds, which may lead to ineffective branching decisions on problems with highly varying objective gains. We suggest two new notions of reliability motivated by mathematical statistics that take into account the sample variance of the past observations on each variable individually. The first method prioritizes additional strong-branching look-aheads on variables whose pseudo-costs show a large variance by measuring the relative error of a pseudo-cost confidence interval. The second method performs a two-sample Student-t test for filtering branching candidates with a high probability to be better than the best history candidate. Both methods were implemented in the MIP-solver SCIP and computational results on standard MIP test sets are presented.
    Language: English
    Type: reportzib , doc-type:preprint
    Format: application/pdf
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  • 15
    Publication Date: 2022-03-14
    Description: Modern solving software for mixed-integer programming (MIP) incorporates numerous algorithmic components whose behavior is controlled by user parameter choices, and whose usefulness dramatically varies depending on the progress of the solving process. In this thesis, our aim is to construct a phase-based solver that dynamically reacts on phase transitions with an appropriate change of its component behavior. Therefore, we decompose the branch-and-bound solving process into three distinct phases: The first phase objective is to find a feasible solution. During the second phase, a sequence of incumbent solutions gets constructed until the incumbent is eventually optimal. Proving optimality is the central objective of the remaining third phase. Based on the MIP-solver SCIP we construct a phase-based solver to make use of the phase concept in two steps: First, we identify promising components for every solving phase individually and show that their combination is beneficial on a test bed of practical MIP instances. We then present and evaluate three heuristic criteria to make use of the phase-based solver in practice, where it is infeasible to distinguish between the last two phases before the termination of the solving process.
    Language: English
    Type: masterthesis , doc-type:masterThesis
    Format: application/pdf
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  • 16
    Publication Date: 2022-05-09
    Description: We propose a simple and general online method to measure the search progress within the branch-and-bound algorithm, from which we estimate the size of the remaining search tree. We then show how this information can help solvers algorithmically at runtime by designing a restart strategy for Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) solvers that decides whether to restart the search based on the current estimate of the number of remaining nodes in the tree. We refer to this type of algorithm as clairvoyant. Our clairvoyant restart strategy outperforms a state-of-the-art solver on a large set of publicly available MIP benchmark instances. It is implemented in the MIP solver SCIP and will be available in future releases.
    Language: German
    Type: conferenceobject , doc-type:conferenceObject
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  • 17
    Publication Date: 2022-05-09
    Description: We propose a simple and general online method to measure the search progress within the Branch-and-Bound algorithm, from which we estimate the size of the remaining search tree. We then show how this information can help solvers algorithmically at runtime by designing a restart strategy for Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) solvers that decides whether to restart the search based on the current estimate of the number of remaining nodes in the tree. We refer to this type of algorithm as clairvoyant. Our clairvoyant restart strategy outperforms a state-of-the-art solver on a large set of publicly available MIP benchmark instances. It is implemented in the MIP solver SCIP and will be available in future releases.
    Language: English
    Type: reportzib , doc-type:preprint
    Format: application/pdf
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  • 18
    Publication Date: 2024-01-12
    Description: The SCIP Optimization Suite is a software toolbox for generating and solving various classes of mathematical optimization problems. Its major components are the modeling language ZIMPL, the linear programming solver SoPlex, the constraint integer programming framework and mixed-integer linear and nonlinear programming solver SCIP, the UG framework for parallelization of branch-and-bound-based solvers, and the generic branch-cut-and-price solver GCG. It has been used in many applications from both academia and industry and is one of the leading non-commercial solvers. This paper highlights the new features of version 3.2 of the SCIP Optimization Suite. Version 3.2 was released in July 2015. This release comes with new presolving steps, primal heuristics, and branching rules within SCIP. In addition, version 3.2 includes a reoptimization feature and improved handling of quadratic constraints and special ordered sets. SoPlex can now solve LPs exactly over the rational number and performance improvements have been achieved by exploiting sparsity in more situations. UG has been tested successfully on 80,000 cores. A major new feature of UG is the functionality to parallelize a customized SCIP solver. GCG has been enhanced with a new separator, new primal heuristics, and improved column management. Finally, new and improved extensions of SCIP are presented, namely solvers for multi-criteria optimization, Steiner tree problems, and mixed-integer semidefinite programs.
    Language: English
    Type: reportzib , doc-type:preprint
    Format: application/pdf
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  • 19
    Publication Date: 2024-01-12
    Description: State-of-the-art solvers for mixed integer programs (MIP) govern a variety of algorithmic components. Ideally, the solver adaptively learns to concentrate its computational budget on those components that perform well on a particular problem, especially if they are time consuming. We focus on three such algorithms, namely the classes of large neighborhood search and diving heuristics as well as Simplex pricing strategies. For each class we propose a selection strategy that is updated based on the observed runtime behavior, aiming to ultimately select only the best algorithms for a given instance. We review several common strategies for such a selection scenario under uncertainty, also known as Multi Armed Bandit Problem. In order to apply those bandit strategies, we carefully design reward functions to rank and compare each individual heuristic or pricing algorithm within its respective class. Finally, we discuss the computational benefits of using the proposed adaptive selection within the SCIP Optimization Suite on publicly available MIP instances.
    Language: English
    Type: conferenceobject , doc-type:conferenceObject
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  • 20
    Publication Date: 2024-01-12
    Description: State-of-the-art solvers for mixed integer programs (MIP) govern a variety of algorithmic components. Ideally, the solver adaptively learns to concentrate its computational budget on those components that perform well on a particular problem, especially if they are time consuming. We focus on three such algorithms, namely the classes of large neighborhood search and diving heuristics as well as Simplex pricing strategies. For each class we propose a selection strategy that is updated based on the observed runtime behavior, aiming to ultimately select only the best algorithms for a given instance. We review several common strategies for such a selection scenario under uncertainty, also known as Multi Armed Bandit Problem. In order to apply those bandit strategies, we carefully design reward functions to rank and compare each individual heuristic or pricing algorithm within its respective class. Finally, we discuss the computational benefits of using the proposed adaptive selection within the \scip Optimization Suite on publicly available MIP instances.
    Language: English
    Type: reportzib , doc-type:preprint
    Format: application/pdf
    Library Location Call Number Volume/Issue/Year Availability
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