Abstract We present a novel relaxation for general nonconvex sparse MINLP problems, called overlapping convex hull relaxation (CHR). It is defined by replacing all nonlinear constraint sets by their convex hulls. If the convex hulls are disjunctive, e.g. if the MINLP is block-separable, the CHR is equivalent to the convex hull relaxation obtained by (standard) column generation (CG). The CHR can be used for computing an initial lower bound in the root node of a branch-and-bound algorithm, or for computing a start vector for a local-search-based MINLP heuristic. We describe a dynamic block and column generation (DBCG) MINLP algorithm to generate the CHR by dynamically adding aggregated blocks. The idea of adding aggregated blocks in the CHR is similar to the well-known cutting plane approach. Numerical experiments on nonconvex MINLP instances show that the duality gap can be significantly reduced with the results of CHRs. DBCG is implemented as part of the CG-MINLP framework Decogo, see https://decogo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html .

Abstract This paper presents a new two-phase method for solving convex mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems, called Decomposition-based Outer Approximation Algorithm (DECOA). In the first phase, a sequence of linear integer relaxed sub-problems (LP phase) is solved in order to rapidly generate a good linear relaxation of the original MINLP problem. In the second phase, the algorithm solves a sequence of mixed integer linear programming sub-problems (MIP phase). In both phases the outer approximation is improved iteratively by adding new supporting hyperplanes by solving many easier sub-problems in parallel. DECOA is implemented as a part of Decogo (Decomposition-based Global Optimizer), a parallel decomposition-based MINLP solver implemented in Python and Pyomo. Preliminary numerical results based on 70 convex MINLP instances up to 2700 variables show that due to the generated cuts in the LP phase, on average only 2–3 MIP problems have to be solved in the MIP phase.