arXiv subjects

Hamish Waterer

Publications and source records attributed to Hamish Waterer.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2019

Maintenance scheduling in a railway corricdor

We investigate a novel scheduling problem which is motivated by an application in the Australian railway industry. Given a set of maintenance jobs and a set of train paths over a railway corridor with bidirectional traffic, we seek a schedule of jobs such that a minimum number of train paths are cancelled due to conflict with the job schedule. We show that the problem is NP-complete in general. In a special case of the problem when every job under any schedule just affects one train path, and the speed of trains is bounded from above and below, we show that the problem can be solved in polynomial time. Moreover, in another special case of the problem where the traffic is unidirectional, we show that the problem can be solved in time $O(n^4)$.

math.OC↗

arXiv2019

Extended formulations for convex hulls of graphs of bilinear functions

We consider the problem of characterizing the convex hull of the graph of a bilinear function $f$ on the $n$-dimensional unit cube $[0,1]^n$. Extended formulations for this convex hull are obtained by taking subsets of the facets of the Boolean Quadric Polytope (BQP). Extending existing results, we propose a systematic study of properties of $f$ that guarantee that certain classes of BQP facets are sufficient for an extended formulation. We use a modification of Zuckerberg's geometric method for proving convex hull characterizations [Geometric proofs for convex hull defining formulations, Operations Research Letters \textbf{44} (2016), 625--629] to prove some initial results in this direction. In particular, we provide small-sized extended formulations for bilinear functions whose corresponding graph is either a cycle with arbitrary edge weights or a clique or an almost clique with unit edge weights.

math.OC↗

arXiv2018

Tight MIP formulations for bounded length cyclic sequences

We study cyclic binary strings with bounds on the lengths of the intervals of consecutive ones and zeros. This is motivated by scheduling problems where such binary strings can be used to represent the state (on/off) of a machine. In this context the bounds correspond to minimum and maximum lengths of on- or off-intervals, and cyclic strings can be used to model periodic schedules. Extending results for non-cyclic strings is not straight forward. We present a non-trivial tight compact extended network flow formulation, as well as valid inequalities in the space of the state and start-up variables some of which are shown to be facet-defining. Applying a result from disjunctive programming, we also convert the extended network flow formulation into an extended formulation over the space of the state and start-up variables.

math.OC↗