Formulating linear programs are hard!

When I was younger I was teaching linear programming (LP) to business students. One lesson I learned is that formulating an LP is much harder than it appears when reading a standard text book. Recently I came  across the paper  "Formulating Integer Linear Programs: A Rogues’ Gallery" which provides many ideas that can be useful when formulating LPs.

In need of a optimal basis improvement procedure in linear programming.

One of our MOSEK customers is solving an LP with the primal simplex optimizer. Next she does a sensitivity analysis but that fails because the optimal basis is singular. This should not happen in ideal world but can happen for at least three reasons:

• A bug may cause the optimal basis to be singular.
• The primal simplex optimizer works on a presolved and scaled problem. Whereas the sensitivity analysis is performed on the original problems. The basis might be well-conditioned in the presolved and scaled "space" and not the original space.
• The simplex optimizer usually starts with a nicely conditioned basis. In each iteration an LU representation of the basis is updated using rank 1 updates. If the rank 1 update signals that the basis is ill-conditioned then the iterations is continued. Using an idea by John Tomlin it is possible in some cases to discover that the basis becomes ill-conditioned during the rank-1 update. Hence, it might very well be that an ill-conditioned basis is not discovered. Particularly if it becomes ill-conditioned in the last simplex iteration.

Since most real world LPs have multiple optimal basic solutions then looking for the best conditioned (near) optimal basis might be very useful before doing sensitivity analysis or even hotstart. Finding the best conditioned optimal basis is most likely not computationally feasible but maybe it can done in approximate way.

At ISMP 2009 I saw a talk about the cutting plane methods. There was some relation between the quality of the cuts generated and the conditioning of the basis.

Btw. the John Tomlin article I am referring to is "An Accuracy Test for Updating Triangular Factors", Mathematical Programming Study 4, pp. 142-145 (1975).