No Arabic abstract
Given its wide spectrum of applications, the classical problem of all-terminal network reliability evaluation remains a highly relevant problem in network design. The associated optimization problem -- to find a network with the best possible reliability under multiple constraints -- presents an even more complex challenge, which has been addressed in the scientific literature but usually under strong assumptions over failures probabilities and/or the network topology. In this work, we propose a novel reliability optimization framework for network design with failures probabilities that are independent but not necessarily identical. We leverage the linear-time evaluation procedure for network reliability in the series-parallel graphs of Satyanarayana and Wood(1985) to formulate the reliability optimization problem as a mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problem. To solve this nonconvex problem, we use classical convex envelopes of bilinear functions, introduce custom cutting planes, and propose a new family of convex envelopes for expressions that appear in the evaluation of network reliability. Furthermore, we exploit the refinements produced by spatial branch-and-bound to locally strengthen our convex relaxations. Our experiments show that, using our framework, one can efficiently obtain optimal solutions in challenging instances of this problem.
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.
Energy minimization has been an intensely studied core problem in computer vision. With growing image sizes (2D and 3D), it is now highly desirable to run energy minimization algorithms in parallel. But many existing algorithms, in particular, some efficient combinatorial algorithms, are difficult to par-allelize. By exploiting results from convex and submodular theory, we reformulate the quadratic energy minimization problem as a total variation denoising problem, which, when viewed geometrically, enables the use of projection and reflection based convex methods. The resulting min-cut algorithm (and code) is conceptually very simple, and solves a sequence of TV denoising problems. We perform an extensive empirical evaluation comparing state-of-the-art combinatorial algorithms and convex optimization techniques. On small problems the iterative convex methods match the combinatorial max-flow algorithms, while on larger problems they offer other flexibility and important gains: (a) their memory footprint is small; (b) their straightforward parallelizability fits multi-core platforms; (c) they can easily be warm-started; and (d) they quickly reach approximately good solutions, thereby enabling faster inexact solutions. A key consequence of our approach based on submodularity and convexity is that it is allows to combine any arbitrary combinatorial or convex methods as subroutines, which allows one to obtain hybrid combinatorial and convex optimization algorithms that benefit from the strengths of both.
This paper considers a distributed convex optimization problem over a time-varying multi-agent network, where each agent has its own decision variables that should be set so as to minimize its individual objective subject to local constraints and global coupling equality constraints. Over directed graphs, a distributed algorithm is proposed that incorporates the push-sum protocol into dual subgradient methods. Under the convexity assumption, the optimality of primal and dual variables, and constraint violations is first established. Then the explicit convergence rates of the proposed algorithm are obtained. Finally, some numerical experiments on the economic dispatch problem are provided to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.
We investigate a distributed optimization problem over a cooperative multi-agent time-varying network, where each agent has its own decision variables that should be set so as to minimize its individual objective subject to local constraints and global coupling constraints. Based on push-sum protocol and dual decomposition, we design a distributed regularized dual gradient algorithm to solve this problem, in which the algorithm is implemented in time-varying directed graphs only requiring the column stochasticity of communication matrices. By augmenting the corresponding Lagrangian function with a quadratic regularization term, we first obtain the bound of the Lagrangian multipliers which does not require constructing a compact set containing the dual optimal set when compared with most of primal-dual based methods. Then, we obtain that the convergence rate of the proposed method can achieve the order of $mathcal{O}(ln T/T)$ for strongly convex objective functions, where $T$ is the iterations. Moreover, the explicit bound of constraint violations is also given. Finally, numerical results on the network utility maximum problem are used to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.
We propose an accelerated meta-algorithm, which allows to obtain accelerated methods for convex unconstrained minimization in different settings. As an application of the general scheme we propose nearly optimal methods for minimizing smooth functions with Lipschitz derivatives of an arbitrary order, as well as for smooth minimax optimization problems. The proposed meta-algorithm is more general than the ones in the literature and allows to obtain better convergence rates and practical performance in several settings.