Computers & Chemical Engineering, Vol.61, 136-155, 2014
Approximate solution of mp-MILP problems using piecewise affine relaxation of bilinear terms
We propose an approximate solution strategy for multi-parametric mixed integer linear programming (mp-MILP) problems with parameter dependency at multiple locations in the model. A two-stage solution strategy, consisting of an approximation stage and a multi-parametric programming stage, is introduced. At the approximation stage, surrogate mp-MILP models are derived by overestimating bilinear terms in the constraints over an ab initio partitioning of the domain. We then incorporate piecewise affine relaxation based models using a linear partitioning scheme and a logarithmic partitioning scheme, respectively. The models are tuned by the number of partitions chosen. Problem sizes of the varied models, and computational requirements for the algorithmic procedure are compared. The conservatism of the suboptimal solution of the mp-MILP problem for the piecewise affine relaxation based two-stage method is discussed. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.