Solving bilevel quadratic programming problems and its application

Abstract

Bilevel programming is a powerful method recently developed to tackle multi variable and double layer programming problems. These problems appear everywhere especially in the industrial, supply-chain management, and marketing programming applications. In this study, a novel approach was proposed to solve the bilevel quadratic programming problems. The proposed approach named ergodic branch-and-bound method, respectively solving small and large variable-space problems. It's perform better accuracy and computing efficiency compared with traditional approaches even when tackling the non-linear (quadratic) bilevel problems which cannot be solved sometimes by the conventional methods. Furthermore, a logistic distribution centres' application was introduced as an example to present our new proposed approach. The application results indicated that the proposed approach is applicable and advantageous. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.