A feasibility pump heuristic for general mixed-integer problems

Finding a feasible solution of a given Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) model is a very important (NP-complete) problem that can be extremely hard in practice. Very recently, Fischetti, Glover and Lodi proposed a heuristic scheme for finding a feasible solution to general MIPs, called Feasibility Pump (FP). According to the computational analysis reported by these authors, FP is indeed quite effective in finding feasible solutions of hard 0-1 MIPs. However, MIPs with generalinteger variables seem much more difficult to solve by using the FP approach. In this paper we elaborate on the Fischetti-Glover-Lodi approach and extend it in two main directions, namely (i) handling as effectively as possible MIP problems with both binary and general-integer variables, and (ii) exploiting the FP information to drive a subsequent enumeration phase. Extensive computational results on large sets of test instances from the literature are reported, showing the effectiveness of our improved FP sche...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: DISOPT
• Authors: Livio Bertacco, Matteo Fischetti, Andrea Lodi
• Keywords: DISOPT 2007, Feasible Solutions, FP Approach, Hard 0-1 Mips