A binarisation heuristic for non-convex quadratic programming with box constraints

Non-convex quadratic programming with box constraints is a fundamental problem in the global optimisation literature, being one of the simplest NP-hard nonlinear programs. We present a new heuristic for this problem, which enables one to obtain solutions of excellent quality in reasonable computing times. The heuristic consists of four phases: binarisation, convexification, branch-and-bound, and local optimisation. Some very encouraging computational results are given.