Stabilized Column Generation Via the Dynamic Separation of Aggregated Rows

Column generation (CG) algorithms are well known to suffer from convergence issues due, mainly, to the degenerate structure of their master problem and the instability associated with the dual variables involved in the process. In the literature, several strategies have been proposed to overcome this issue. These techniques rely either on the modification of the standard CG algorithm or on some prior information about the set of dual optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a new stabilization framework, which relies on the dynamic generation of aggregated rows from the CG master problem. To evaluate the performance of our method and its flexibility, we consider instances of three different problems, namely, vehicle routing with time windows (VRPTW), bin packing with conflicts (BPPC), and multiperson pose estimation (MPPEP). When solving the VRPTW, the proposed stabilized CG method yields significant improvements in terms of CPU time and number of iterations with respect to a standard CG algorithm. Huge reductions in CPU time are also achieved when solving the BPPC and the MPPEP. For the latter, our method has shown to be competitive when compared with a tailored method. Summary of Contribution: Column generation (CG) algorithms are among the most important and studied solution methods in operations research. CG algorithms are suitable to cope with large-scale problems arising from several real-life applications. The present paper proposes a generic stabilization framework to address two of the main issues found in a CG method: degeneracy in the master problem and massive instability of the dual variables. The newly devised method, called dynamic separation of aggregated rows (dyn-SAR), relies on an extended master problem that contains redundant constraints obtained by aggregating constraints from the original master problem formulation. This new formulation is solved in a column/row generation fashion. The efficacy of the proposed method is tested through an extensive experimental campaign, where we solve three different problems that differ considerably in terms of their constraints and objective function. Despite being a generic framework, dyn-SAR requires the embedded CG algorithm to be tailored to the application at hand.