Application of Combinatorial Optimization in Logistics

Contributors

OF THE DISSERTATION Two applications of combinatorial optimization by Matthew R. Oster Dissertation Director: Professor Jonathan Eckstein This thesis presents two applications of combinatorial optimization. The first part contains a detailed description of a conference scheduling problem. We model the problem as a symmetric clustering problem, or a variant of minimum k-partition we call capacitated k-partition. This problem is proved to be NP-hard to solve to optimality, and further, unless P = NP, no constant factor polynomial-time approximation algorithm exists. We also propose a branch-and-cut algorithm with semidefinite programming relaxations enhanced with polyhedral cuts found at each tree node. Many cutting planes are demonstrated to be satisfied, or provably close to being satisfied, by semidefinite matrices in the variable space [−1/(k − 1), 1], which is in contrast to basic linear programming relaxations. Our algorithm also relies on a novel heuristic strategy when attempting to generate feasible solutions at every tree node. We test an implementation of our algorithm on random k-partition instances as well as a particular conference data set which comes from the 13th Annual INFORMS Computing Society Conference and was solved to within 0.85% of optimum in under 4 hours. The results here are promising and provide a starting point for future projects. In the second part, we describe a project called the Boat Allocation Module, where a team comprised of United States Coast Guard (USCG) analysts, and Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis researchers worked

The shortest route finding problem is a significant topic in graph theory and combinatorial optimization, with wide applications in logistics, transportation, and scheduling. This research aims to improve the quality of the solution and time efficiency in solving the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) by optimizing the Cheapest Insertion Heuristic (CIH) algorithm using the application of the Tabu Search algorithm. The CIH algorithm constructs an initial solution by inserting points based on minimum weight. At the same time, the Tabu Search algorithm is applied to enhance the solution by avoiding local optima using a tabu list mechanism. The research data, consisting of the distances between parking retribution collection points by the Malang City Transportation Agency in Sukun Sub-district, were obtained from Google Maps. The algorithm performance evaluation is done by comparing the total mileage before and after optimization, and statistically analyzed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test because the data does not follow a normal distribution. The results showed that optimizing the CIH algorithm using the Tabu Search algorithm significantly resulted in routes with shorter travel distances than using the CIH algorithm alone. This finding proves that optimizing the CIH algorithm with Tabu Search increases the effectiveness of finding the shortest route.The shortest route finding problem is a significant topic in graph theory and combinato-rial optimization, with wide applications in logistics, transportation, and scheduling. Thisresearch aims to improve the quality of the solution and time efficiency in solving the Trav-eling Salesman Problem (TSP) by optimizing the Cheapest Insertion Heuristic (CIH) algo-rithm using the application of the Tabu Search algorithm. The CIH algorithm constructs aninitial solution by inserting points based on minimum weight. At the same time, the TabuSearch algorithm is applied to enhance the solution by avoiding local optima using a tabulist mechanism. The research data, consisting of the distances between parking retributioncollection points by the Malang City Transportation Agency in Sukun Sub-district, were ob-tained from Google Maps. The algorithm performance evaluation is done by comparing thetotal mileage before and after optimization, and statistically analyzed using the Wilcoxonsigned-rank test because the data does not follow a normal distribution. The results showedthat optimizing the CIH algorithm using the Tabu Search algorithm significantly resulted inroutes with shorter travel distances than using the CIH algorithm alone. This finding provesthat optimizing the CIH algorithm with Tabu Search increases the effectiveness of findingthe shortest route.

Combinatorial optimization problems have very important applications in information technology, transportation, economics, management, network communication, and other fields. Since the problem size in real-scenario application is in large-scale, the demand for real-time and efficient solving approaches increases rapidly. The traditional exact methods guarantee the optimality of the final solution, but these methods can hardly solve the problem in acceptable time due to extremely high computational costs. Heuristic approaches can find feasible solutions in a limited time, while these approaches cannot meet the demand of solution quality. In recent years, hybrid algorithms based on exact methods and heuristic algorithms show outstanding performance in solving large-scale combinatorial optimization problems. The hybridization not only overcomes the shortcomings from single algorithm but also fully utilizes the search ability for population-based approaches as well as the interpretability in exact methods, which promotes the application of combinatorial optimization in real-world problems. This paper reviews existing studies on hybrid algorithms combining exact method and evolutionary computation, summarizes the characteristics of the existing algorithms, and directs the future research.

As a well‐structured and costly activity that pervades industries in both the public and private sector, vehicle fleet management would appear to be a splendid candidate for model‐based planning and optimization. And yet, until recently the combinatorial intricacies of vehicle routing and of vehicle scheduling have precluded the widespread use of optimization (exact) methods for this problem class. Our discussion in this paper identifies the extent and nature of these problem complexities and draws contrasts with other applications of combinatorial optimization. It also summarizes a number of successful uses of optimization for vehicle fleet planning and highlights potentially fruitful avenues for algorithmic development. In particular, we describe several alternative models and novel algorithms for the vehicle routing problem, show how various modeling approaches for this problem are intimately related, and illustrate the interplay between model formulations and the algorithms that they suggest. This discussion shows that prospects for applying exact methods, possibly in conjunction with heuristics, are far from fully realized and points to vehicle fleet planning as a tempting target of opportunity for further investigation.

Finding the largest suborder of fixed width in a partially ordered set is an interesting combinatorial problem with applications in combinatorial optimization and scheduling. We present a polynomial time solution for this problem by transforming it into a minimum cost network flow problem in an appropriate auxiliary network.

This paper deals with algorithms for positive semidefinite matrix factorization (PSDMF). PSDMF is a recently-proposed extension of nonnegative matrix factorization with applications in combinatorial optimization, among others. In this paper, we focus on improving the local convergence of an alternating block gradient (ABC) method for PSDMF in a noise-free setting by replacing the quadratic objective function with the Poisson log-likelihood. This idea is based on truncated Wirtinger flow (TWF), a phase retrieval (PR) method that trims outliers in the gradient and thus regularizes it. Our motivation is a recent result linking PR with PSDMF. Our numerical experiments validate that the numerical benefits of TWF may carry over to PSDMF despite the more challenging setting, when initialized within its region of convergence. We then extend TWF from PR to affine rank minimization (ARM), and show that although the outliers are no longer an issue in the ARM setting, PSDMF with the new objective function may still achieves a smaller error for the same number of iterations. In a broader view, our results indicate that a proper choice of objective function may enhance convergence of matrix (or tensor) factorization methods.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to introduce a general equation for eigensolution. Eigenvalues and eigenvectors of graphs have many applications in combinatorial optimization and structural mechanics. Some important applications of graph products consist of nodal ordering and graph partitioning for structuring the structural matrices and finite element subdomaining, respectively.Design/methodology/approachIn the existing methods for the eigensolution of Laplacian matrices, members have been added to the model of a graph product such that for its Laplacian matrix an algebraic relation between blocks become possible. These methods are categorized as topological approaches. Here, using concepts of linear algebra a general algebraic method is developed.FindingsA new algebraic method is introduced for calculating the eigenvalues of Laplacian matrices in graph products.Originality/valueThe present method provides a simple tool for calculating the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrices without using the configurational model and merely by using the Laplacian matrices. The developed formula for calculating the eigenvalues contains approximate terms which can be managed by the analyst.

The comparative performance of Integer Programming (IP) and Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) is explored by examining a number of models for four different combinatorial optimization applications. Computational results show contrasting behavior for the two approaches, and an analysis of performance with respect to problem and model characteristics is presented. The analysis shows that tightness of formulation is of great benefit to CLP where effective search reduction results in problems that can be solved quickly. In IP, if the linear feasible region does not identify the corresponding integer polytope, the problem may be difficult to solve. The paper identifies other characteristics of model behavior and concludes by examining ways in which IP and CLP may be incorporated within hybrid solvers.

Given the NP-Hard nature of many optimization problems, it is often impractical to obtain optimal solutions to large-scale problems in reasonable computing time. For this reason, heuristic and metaheuristic search approaches are used to obtain good solutions fast. However, these techniques often struggle to develop a good balance between local and global search. In this paper we propose a hybrid metaheuristic approach which we call the NeuroGenetic approach to search for good solutions for these large scale optimization problems by at least partially overcoming this challenge. The proposed NeuroGenetic approach combines the Augmented Neural Network (AugNN) and the Genetic Algorithm (GA) search approaches by interleaving the two. We chose these two approaches to hybridize, as they offer complementary advantages and disadvantages; GAs are very good at searching globally, while AugNNs are more proficient at searching locally. The proposed hybrid strategy capitalizes on the strong points of each approach while avoiding their shortcomings. In the paper we discuss the issues associated with the feasibility of hybridizing these two approaches and propose an interleaving algorithm. We also provide empirical evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

In various applications of multi-robotics in disaster response, warehouse management, and manufacturing, tasks that are known a priori and tasks added during run time need to be assigned efficiently and without conflicts to robots in the team. This multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) process presents itself as a combinatorial optimization (CO) problem that is usually challenging to be solved in meaningful timescales using typical (mixed)integer (non)linear programming tools. Building on a growing body of work in using graph reinforcement learning to learn search heuristics for such complex CO problems, this paper presents a new graph neural network architecture called the covariant attention mechanism (CAM). CAM can not only generalize but also scale to larger problems than that encountered in training, and handle dynamic tasks. This architecture combines the concept of covariant compositional networks used here to embed the local structures in task graphs, with a context module that encodes the robots’ states. The encoded information is passed onto a decoder designed using multi-head attention mechanism. When applied to a class of MRTA problems with time deadlines, robot ferry range constraints, and multi-trip settings, CAM surpasses a state-of-the-art graph learning approach based on the attention mechanism, as well as a feasible random-walk baseline across various generalizability and scalability tests. Performance of CAM is also found to be at par with a high-performing non-learning baseline called BiG-MRTA, while noting up to a 70-fold improvement in decision-making efficiency over this baseline.

Summary of Volume 3: Applications of Combinatorial Optimization

The probabilistic travelling salesman problem (PTSP) is an extension of the well-known travelling salesman problem (TSP), which has been extensively studied in the field of combinatorial optimization. The goal of the TSP is to find the minimum length of a tour to all customers, given the distances between all pairs of customers whereas the objective of the PTSP is to minimize the expected length of the a priori tour where each customer requires a visit only with a given probability (Bertsimas, 1988; Bertsimas et al., 1990; Jaillet, 1985). The main difference between the PTSP and the TSP is that in the PTSP the probability of each node being visited is between 0.0 and 1.0 while in TSP the probability of each node being visited is 1.0. Due to the fact that the element of uncertainty not only exists, but also significantly affects the system performance in many real-world transportation and logistics applications, the results from the PTSP can provide insights into research in other probabilistic combinatorial optimization problems. Moreover, the PTSP can also be used to model many real-world applications in logistical and transportation planning, such as daily pickup-delivery services with stochastic demand, job sequencing involving changeover cost, design of retrieval sequences in a warehouse or in a cargo terminal operations, meals on wheels in senior citizen services, trip-chaining activities, vehicle routing problem with stochastic demand, and home delivery service under e-commerce (Bartholdi et al., 1983; Bertsimas et al., 1995; Campbell, 2006; Jaillet, 1988; Tang & Miller-Hooks, 2004). Early PTSP computational studies, dating from 1985, adopted heuristic approaches that were modified from the TSP (e.g., nearest neighbor, savings approach, spacefilling curve, radial sorting, 1-shift, and 2-opt exchanges) (Bartholdi & Platzman, 1988; Bertsimas, 1988; Bertsimas & Howell, 1993; Jaillet, 1985, 1987; Rossi & Gavioli, 1987). With its less than satisfactory performance in yielding solution quality, researchers in the recent years switch to metaheuristic methods, such as ant colony optimization (Bianchi, 2006; Branke & Guntsch, 2004), evolutionary algorithm (Liu et al., 2007), simulated annealing (Bowler et al., 2003), threshold accepting (Tang & Miller-Hooks, 2004) and scatter search (Liu, 2006, 2007, 2008). Because the genetic algorithm (GA), a conceptual framework of the population-based metaheuristic method, has been shown to yield promising outcomes for solving various complicated optimization problems in the past three decades (Back et al., 1997; Davis, 1991; O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .ite ch on lin e. co m

Fog computing is a challenging task because it requires all of the available resources, which increases as the number of users working in this environment grows. Most existing resource allocation techniques focus on providing performance for a particular workload, so more users create more demand for resources. The resource management algorithm is an NP-complete problem that has varying time requirements depending on the size of the problem. Optimal management of resources in fog computing can be done through heuristic, meta-heuristic and hybrid approaches. The meta-heuristics approaches can handle large search spaces and discover better solutions for resource management within a reasonable time. This paper presents a detailed review of heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms for resource optimization in fog computing environments. It compares each category of the algorithm based on performance metrics, tools used, advantages, and disadvantages so to make informed decisions about which algorithm will work best for any formulated problem. These algorithms are capable of achieving more than the previous state-of-the-art performance at lower cost, as well as improved utilization of resources and increased energy efficiency.

Test case minimization approach using fault detection and combinatorial optimization techniques for configuration-aware structural testing