Mixed-integer programming methods for transportation and power generation problems

This dissertation conducts theoretical and computational research to solve challenging problems in application areas such as supply chain and power systems. The first part of the dissertation studies a transportation problem with market choice (TPMC) which is a variant of the classical transportation problem in which suppliers with limited capacities have a choice of which demands (markets) to satisfy. We show that TPMC is strongly NP-complete. We consider a version of the problem with a service level constraint on the maximum number of markets that can be rejected and show that if the original problem is polynomial, its cardinality-constrained version is also polynomial. We propose valid inequalities for mixed-integer cover and knapsack sets with variable upper bound constraints, which appear as substructures of TPMC and use them in a branch-and-cut algorithm to solve this problem. The second part of this dissertation studies a unit commitment (UC) problem in which the goal is to minimize the operational cost of power generators over a time period subject to physical constraints while satisfying demand. We provide several exponential classes of multi-period ramping and multi-period variable upper bound inequalities. We prove the strength of these inequalities and describe polynomial-time separation algorithms. Computational results show the effectiveness of the proposed inequalities when used as cuts in a branch-and-cut algorithm to solve the UC problem. The last part of this dissertation investigates the effects of uncertain wind power on the UC problem. A two-stage robust model and a three-stage stochastic program are compared.