APOGEE: Global optimization of standard, generalized, and extended pooling problems via linear and logarithmic partitioning schemes

Our recent work globally optimized two classes of large-scale pooling problems: a generalized pooling problem treating the network topology as a decision variable and an extended pooling problem incorporating environmental regulations into constraints. The pooling problems were optimized using a piecewise linear scheme that activates appropriate under- and overestimators with a number of binary decision variables that scales linearly with the number of segments in the piecewise relaxation. Inspired by recent work Vielma and Nemhauser, 2010 and Vielma et al., 2010a, we introduce a formulation for the piecewise linear relaxation of bilinear functions with a logarithmic number of binary variables and computationally compare the performance of this new formulation to the best-performing piecewise relaxations with a linear number of binary variables. We have unified our work by developing APOGEE, a computational tool that globally optimizes standard, generalized, and extended pooling problems. APOGEE is freely available to the scientific community at helios.princeton.edu/APOGEE/.