An in-out approach to disjunctive optimization

Abstract

Cutting plane methods are widely used for solving convex optimization problems and are of fundamental importance, e.g., to provide tight bounds for Mixed-Integer Programs (MIPs). This is obtained by embedding a cut-separation module within a search scheme. The importance of a sound search scheme is well known in the Constraint Programming (CP) community. Unfortunately, the "standard" search scheme typically used for MIP problems, known as the Kelley method, is often quite unsatisfactory because of saturation issues. In this paper we address the so-called Lift-and-Project closure for 0-1 MIPs associated with all disjunctive cuts generated from a given set of elementary disjunction. We focus on the search scheme embedding the generated cuts. In particular, we analyze a general meta-scheme for cutting plane algorithms, called in-out search, that was recently proposed by Ben-Ameur and Neto [1]. Computational results on test instances from the literature are presented, showing that using a more clever meta-scheme on top of a black-box cut generator may lead to a significant improvement. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.