9811 Mixing Mixed - Integer Inequalities

Mixed-integer rounding (MIR) inequalities play a central role in the development of strong cutting planes for mixed-integer programs. In this paper, we investigate how known MIR inequalities can be combined in order to generate new strong valid inequalities. Given a mixed-integer region S and a collection of valid “base” mixed-integer inequalities, we develop a procedure for generating new valid inequalities for S. The starting point of our procedure is to consider the MIR inequalities related with the base inequalities. For any subset of these MIR inequalities, we generate two new inequalities by combining or ”mixing” them. We show that the new inequalities are strong in the sense that they fully describe the convex hull of a mixedinteger region associated with the base inequalities. We also study some extensions of this mixing procedure, and discuss how it can be used to obtain new classes of strong valid inequalities for various mixed-integer programming problems. In particular, we present examples for production planning, capacitated facility location, capacitated network design, and multiple knapsack problems.