Abstract: Natural hazards cause major power outages as a result of spatially-correlated failures of network components. However, these correlations between failures of individual elements are often ignored in probabilistic planning models for optimal network design. We use different types of planning models to demonstrate the impact of ignoring correlations between component failures and the value of flexible transmission assets when power systems are exposed to natural hazards. We consider a network that is hypothetically located in northern Chile, a region that is prone to earthquakes. Using a simulation model, we compute the probabilities of spatially- correlated outages of transmission and substations based on information about historical earthquakes in the area. We determine optimal network designs using a deterministic reliability criterion and probabilistic models that either consider or disregard correlations among component failures. Our results show that the probability of a simultaneous failure of two transmission elements exposed to an earthquake can be up to 15 times higher than the probability simultaneous failure of the same two elements when we only consider independent component failures. Disregarding correlations of component failures changes the optimal network design significantly and increases the expected levels of curtailed demand in scenarios with spatially-correlated failures. We also find that, in some cases, it becomes optimal to invest in HVDC instead of AC transmission lines because the former gives the system operator the flexibility to control power flows in meshed transmission networks. This feature is particularly valuable to systems exposed to natural hazards, where network topologies in post-contingency operating conditions might differ significantly from pre-contingency ones.

Abstract: Intelligent transportation, and in particular, fleet management, has been a forefront concern for a plethora of industries. This statement is especially true for the production of commodities, where transportation represents a central element for operational continuity. Additionally, in many industries, and in particular those with hazardous environments, fleet control must satisfy a wide range of security restrictions to ensure that risks are kept at bay and accidents are minimum. Furthermore, in these environments, any decision support tool must cope with noisy and incomplete data and give recommendations every few minutes. In this work, a fast and efficient decision support tool is presented to help fleet managers oversee and control ore trucks, in a mining setting. The main objective of this system is to help managers avoid interactions between ore trucks and personnel buses, one of the most critical security constraints in our case study, keeping a minimum security distance between the two at all times. Furthermore, additional algorithms are developed and implemented, so that this approach can work with real-life noisy GPS data. Through the use of historical data, the performance of this decision support system is studied, validating that it works under the real-life conditions presented by the company. The experimental results show that the proposed approach improved truck and road utilization significantly while allowing the fleet manager to control the security distance required by their procedures.

Abstract: Convexification based on convex envelopes is ubiquitous in the non-linear optimization literature. Thanks to considerable efforts of the optimization community for decades, we are able to compute the convex envelopes of a considerable number of functions that appear in practice, and thus obtain tight and tractable approximations to challenging problems. We contribute to this line of work by considering a family of functions that, to the best of our knowledge, has not been considered before in the literature. We call this family ray-concave functions. We show sufficient conditions that allow us to easily compute closed-form expressions for the convex envelope of ray-concave functions over arbitrary polytopes. With these tools, we are able to provide new perspectives to previously known convex envelopes and derive a previously unknown convex envelope for a function that arises in probability contexts.

Abstract: Income tax systems with “pass-through” entities transfer a firm's income to shareholders, which are taxed individually. In 2014, a Chilean tax reform introduced this type of entity and changed to an accrual basis that distributes incomes (but not losses) to shareholders. A crucial step for the Chilean taxation authority is to compute the final income of each individual given the complex network of corporations and companies, usually including cycles between them. In this paper, we show the mathematical conceptualization and the solution to the problem, proving that there is only one way to distribute income to taxpayers. Using the theory of absorbing Markov chains, we define a mathematical model for computing the taxable income of each taxpayer, and we propose a decomposition algorithm for this problem. This approach allows us to compute the solution accurately and to efficiently use computational resources. Finally, we present some characteristics of Chilean taxpayers' network and the computational results of the algorithm using this network.

Abstract: For the purpose of production scheduling, open-pit mines are discretized into three-dimensional arrays known as block models. Production scheduling consists of deciding which blocks should be extracted, when they should be extracted, and what to do with the blocks once they are extracted. Blocks that are close to the surface should be extracted first, and capacity constraints limit the production in each time period. Since the 1960s, it has been known that this problem can be cast as an integer programming model. However, the large size of some real instances (3-10 million blocks, 15-20 time periods) has made these models impractical for use in real planning applications, thus leading to the use of numerous heuristic methods. In this article we study a well-known integer programming formulation of the problem that we refer to as C-PIT. We propose a new decomposition method for solving the linear programming relaxation (LP) of C-PIT when there is a single capacity constraint per time period. This algorithm is based on exploiting the structure of the precedence-constrained knapsack problem and runs in O(mn log n) in which n is the number of blocks and m a function of the precedence relationships in the mine. Our computations show that we can solve, in minutes, the LP relaxation of real-sized mine-planning applications with up to five million blocks and 20 time periods. Combining this with a quick rounding algorithm based on topological sorting, we obtain integer feasible solutions to the more general problem where multiple capacity constraints per time period are considered. Our implementation obtains solutions within 6% of optimality in seconds. A second heuristic step, based on local search, allows us to find solutions within 3% in one hour on all instances considered. For most instances, we obtain solutions within 1-2% of optimality if we let this heuristic run longer. Previous methods have been able to tackle only instances with up to 150,000 blocks and 15 time periods.

Abstract: We consider the problem of separating maximally violated inequalities for the precedence constrained knapsack problem. Though we consider maximally violated constraints in a very general way, special emphasis is placed on induced cover inequalities and induced clique inequalities. Our contributions include a new partial characterization of maximally violated inequalities, a new safe shrinking technique, and new insights on strengthening and lifting. This work follows on the work of Boyd (1993), Park and Park (1997), van de Leensel et al. (1999) and Boland et al. (2011). Computational experiments show that our new techniques and insights can be used to significantly improve the performance of cutting plane algorithms for this problem. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract: We introduce a new Integer Linear Programming (ILP) approach for solving Integer Programming (IP) problems with bilinear objectives and linear constraints. The approach relies on a series of ILP approximations of the bilinear P. We compare this approach with standard linearization techniques on random instances and a set of real-world product bundling problems. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract: In this paper we consider characterizations of the robust uncertainty sets associated with coherent and distortion risk measures. In this context we show that if we are willing to enforce the coherent or distortion axioms only on random variables that are affine or linear functions of the vector of random parameters, we may consider some new variants of the uncertainty sets determined by the classical characterizations. We also show that in the finite probability case these variants are simple transformations of the classical sets. Finally we present results of computational experiments that suggest that the risk measures associated with these new uncertainty sets can help mitigate estimation errors of the Conditional Value-at-Risk. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract: We consider a family of competitive facility location problems in which a “newcomer” company enters the market and has to decide where to locate a set of new facilities so as to maximize its market share. The multinomial logit model is used to estimate the captured customer demand. We propose a first branch-and-cut approach for this family of difficult mixed-integer non-linear problems. Our approach combines two types of cutting planes that exploit particular properties of the objective function: the first one are the outer-approximation cuts and the second one are the submodular cuts. The approach is computationally evaluated on three datasets from the recent literature. The obtained results show that our new branch-and-cut drastically outperforms state-of-the-art exact approaches, both in terms of the computing times, and in terms of the number of instances solved to optimality. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.