A heuristic framework for a class of robust optimization problems is proposed.The heuristic framework explores dual information.The heuristic is successfully applied to solve two robust optimization problems.The heuristic is able to outperform a widely used 2-approximation procedure.A robust optimization version of the restricted shortest path problem is introduced. This work deals with a class of problems under interval data uncertainty, namely interval robust-hard problems, composed of interval data min-max regret generalizations of classical NP-hard combinatorial problems modeled as 0-1 integer linear programming problems. These problems are more challenging than other interval data min-max regret problems, as solely computing the cost of any feasible solution requires solving an instance of an NP-hard problem. The state-of-the-art exact algorithms in the literature are based on the generation of a possibly exponential number of cuts. As each cut separation involves the resolution of an NP-hard classical optimization problem, the size of the instances that can be solved efficiently is relatively small. To smooth this issue, we present a modeling technique for interval robust-hard problems in the context of a heuristic framework. The heuristic obtains feasible solutions by exploring dual information of a linearly relaxed model associated with the classical optimization problem counterpart. Computational experiments for interval data min-max regret versions of the restricted shortest path problem and the set covering problem show that our heuristic is able to find optimal or near-optimal solutions and also improves the primal bounds obtained by a state-of-the-art exact algorithm and a 2-approximation procedure for interval data min-max regret problems.
A few works also deal with robust optimization versions of the 0-1 knapsack problem. For instance, the studies @cite_26 and @cite_28 address a version of the problem where the uncertainty over each item profit is represented by a discrete set of possible values. In these works, the absolute robustness criterion is considered. In @cite_28 , the author proved that this version of the problem is strongly NP-hard when the number of possible scenarios is unbounded and pseudo-polynomially solvable for a bounded number of scenarios. @cite_26 also studied a min-max regret version of the problem that considers a discrete set of scenarios of item profits. They provided a pseudo-polynomial algorithm for solving the problem when the number of possible scenarios is bounded. When the number os scenarios is unbounded, the problem becomes strongly NP-hard and there is no approximation scheme for it @cite_38 .
@cite_28 @cite_38 @cite_26
2076163541 2567804199 2770216739 1989921461
Given a set of items, a set of scenarios, and a knapsack of fixed capacity, a nonnegative weight is associated with each item; and a value is associated with each item under each scenario. The max-min Knapsack MNK problem is defined as filling the knapsack with a selected set of items so that the minimum total value gained under all scenarios is maximized. The MNK problem is a generalization of the conventional knapsack problem to situations with multiple scenarios. This extension significantly enlarges its scope of applications, especially in the application of recent robust optimization developments. In this paper, the MNK problem is shown to be strongly NP-hard for an unbounded number of scenarios and pseudopolynomially solvable for a bounded number of scenarios. Effective lower and upper bounds are generated by surrogate relaxation. The ratio of these two bounds is shown to be bounded by a constant for situations where the data range is limited to be within a fixed percentage from its mean. This result leads to an approximation algorithm for MNK in the special case. A branch-and-bound algorithm has been implemented to efficiently solve the MNK problem to optimality. Extensive computational results are presented. An important question in theoretical computer science is to determine the best possible running time for solving a problem at hand. For geometric optimization problems, we often understand their complexity on a rough scale, but not very well on a finer scale. One such example is the two-dimensional knapsack problem for squares. There is a polynomial time (1 + ϵ)-approximation algorithm for it (i.e., a PTAS) but the running time of this algorithm is triple exponential in 1 ϵ, i.e., Ω(n221 ϵ). A double or triple exponential dependence on 1 ϵ is inherent in how this and several other algorithms for other geometric problems work. In this paper, we present an EPTAS for knapsack for squares, i.e., a (1+ϵ)-approximation algorithm with a running time of Oϵ(1)·nO(1). In particular, the exponent of n in the running time does not depend on ϵ at all! Since there can be no FPTAS for the problem (unless P = NP) this is the best kind of approximation scheme we can hope for. To achieve this improvement, we introduce two new key ideas: We present a fast method to guess the Ω(221 ϵ) relatively large squares of a suitable near-optimal packing instead of using brute-force enumeration. Secondly, we introduce an indirect guessing framework to define sizes of cells for the remaining squares. In the previous PTAS each of these steps needs a running time of Ω(n221 ϵ) and we improve both to Oϵ(1) · nO(1). We complete our result by giving an algorithm for two-dimensional knapsack for rectangles under (1 + ϵ)-resource augmentation. In this setting, we also improve the best known running time of Ω(n1 ϵ1 ϵ) to Oϵ(1) · nO(1) and compute even a solution with optimal profit, in contrast to the best previously known polynomial time algorithm for this setting that computes only an approximation. We believe that our new techniques have the potential to be useful for other settings as well. We study the two-dimensional geometric knapsack problem (2DK) in which we are given a set of n axis-aligned rectangular items, each one with an associated profit, and an axis-aligned square knapsack. The goal is to find a (non-overlapping) packing of a maximum profit subset of items inside the knapsack (without rotating items). The best-known polynomial-time approximation factor for this problem (even just in the cardinality case) is (2 + ) [Jansen and Zhang, SODA 2004]. In this paper, we break the 2 approximation barrier, achieving a polynomial-time (17 9 + ) < 1.89 approximation, which improves to (558 325 + ) < 1.72 in the cardinality case. Essentially all prior work on 2DK approximation packs items inside a constant number of rectangular containers, where items inside each container are packed using a simple greedy strategy. We deviate for the first time from this setting: we show that there exists a large profit solution where items are packed inside a constant number of containers plus one L-shaped region at the boundary of the knapsack which contains items that are high and narrow and items that are wide and thin. As a second major and the main algorithmic contribution of this paper, we present a PTAS for this case. We believe that this will turn out to be useful in future work in geometric packing problems. We also consider the variant of the problem with rotations (2DKR), where items can be rotated by 90 degrees. Also, in this case, the best-known polynomial-time approximation factor (even for the cardinality case) is (2 + ) [Jansen and Zhang, SODA 2004]. Exploiting part of the machinery developed for 2DK plus a few additional ideas, we obtain a polynomial-time (3 2 + )-approximation for 2DKR, which improves to (4 3 + ) in the cardinality case. Given @math elements with non-negative integer weights @math and an integer capacity @math , we consider the counting version of the classic knapsack problem: find the number of distinct subsets whose weights add up to at most @math . We give the first deterministic, fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for estimating the number of solutions to any knapsack constraint (our estimate has relative error @math ). Our algorithm is based on dynamic programming. Previously, randomized polynomial-time approximation schemes (FPRAS) were known first by Morris and Sinclair via Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques, and subsequently by Dyer via dynamic programming and rejection sampling. In addition, we present a new method for deterministic approximate counting using read-once branching programs. Our approach yields an FPTAS for several other counting problems, including counting solutions for the multidimensional knapsack problem with a constant number of constraints, the general integer knapsack problem, and the contingency tables problem with a constant number of rows.