Column Generation for Linear and Integer （列生成线性和整数）.pdf

Documenta Math. 65 Column Generation for Linear and Integer Programming George L. Nemhauser 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification: 90 Keywords and Phrases: Column generation, decomposition, linear programming, integer programming, set partitioning, branch-and- price 1 The beginning – linear programming Column generation refers to linear programming (LP) algorithms designed to solve problems in which there are a huge number of variables compared to the number of constraints and the simplex algorithm step of determining whether the current basic solution is optimal or finding a variable to enter the basis is done by solving an optimization problem rather than by enumeration. To the best of my knowledge, the idea of using column generation to solve linear programs was first proposed by Ford and Fulkerson [16]. However, I couldn’t find the term column generation in that paper or the subsequent two seminal papers by Dantzig and Wolfe [8] and Gilmore and Gomory [17,18]. The first use of the term that I could find was in [3], a paper with the title “A column generation algorithm for a ship scheduling problem”. Ford and Fulkerson [16] gave a formulation for a multicommodity maximum flow problem in which the variables represented path flows for each commodity. The commodities represent distinct origin-destination pairs and integrality of the flows is not required. This formulation needs a number of variables ex- ponential in the size of the underlying network since the number of paths in a graph is exponential in the size of the network. What motivated them to propose this formulation? A more natural and smaller formulation in terms of the number of constraints pl