Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:50:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 6825.pdf: 8500191 bytes, checksum: 6105a0900d48c9c1c58657efd7bc22ac (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-12-16 / The tactical management of cash flow is critical in financial management of a company or organization. Several mathematical models for planning cash flow have been proposed in recent decades. Most of the models are deterministic and initially treated as an extension of the economic order quantity. This thesis addresses the cash management problem from the perspective of optimization models present in the Operations Research literature. The aim is to study, develop and apply formulations based on mathematical programming and network flows, considering uncertainties in parameters, to support the decisions involved in managing the cash flow. A case study was developed in a typical company of the stationery sector to analyze the suitability and potential of the proposed approaches for companies of this sector. For that, this thesis implement robust optimization and stochastic programming to address the parameters uncertainties in the problem of maximizing the available financial resources at the end of a multi-period and finite planning horizon of the company's cash flow. The proposed approaches are based on a deterministic model which uses a network flow to maximize the cash flow return at the end of the period. For the treatment of uncertainties in the parameters that define the flow of financial resources in time are used the robust optimization approach of worst case interval and the stochastic programming approach risk neutral, minimax with regret and conditional value-at-risk. There were no other studies in the literature following this line of research. As shown in this thesis the proposed approaches can generated promising results for the management of cash flow in companies of the stationery sector and others, with significant contributions in financial decision-making department, particularly for the treatment of uncertainties in the parameters of the cash flow. / O gerenciamento do fluxo de caixa tático é fundamental na gestão financeira de uma empresa ou organização. Vários modelos matemáticos para planejar o fluxo de caixa foram propostos nas últimas décadas. Na sua maioria, os modelos são determinísticos e, inicialmente, tratados como uma extensão da fórmula do lote econômico de compra. Esta tese aborda o problema da gestão do caixa sob a ótica de modelos de otimização presentes na literatura da Pesquisa Operacional. O objetivo é estudar, desenvolver e aplicar formulações baseadas em programação matemática e fluxos em rede, considerando incertezas nos parâmetros, para apoiar as decisões envolvidas no gerenciamento do fluxo de caixa. Um estudo de caso é desenvolvido numa empresa típica do setor de material escolar, para analisar a adequação e o potencial das abordagens propostas em empresas deste setor. Para tal, são utilizados métodos de otimização robusta e programação estocástica para tratar as incertezas nos parâmetros do problema de maximização dos recursos financeiros disponíveis no final de um horizonte de planejamento multi-período e finito do caixa da empresa. As abordagens propostas são baseadas num modelo determinístico, que utiliza uma rede de fluxos para maximizar o retorno do caixa no final do período considerado. Para o tratamento das incertezas presentes nos parâmetros que definem os fluxos de recursos no tempo, são utilizadas a abordagem de otimização robusta de análise de pior caso intervalar e a abordagem de programação estocástica de dois estágios com recurso neutra ao risco e de aversão ao risco minimax com arrependimento e valor em risco condicional. Não foram encontrados outros estudos na literatura seguindo esta linha de pesquisa. Conforme mostrado nesta tese, as abordagens propostas podem gerar resultados promissores para a gestão do fluxo de caixa de empresas de material escolar e outros, com contribuições significativas nas tomadas de decisões de um gestor financeiro, principalmente quanto ao tratamento das incertezas nos parâmetros do fluxo de caixa.

O objetivo deste trabalho é verificar se ações de companhias que adotam boas práticas de governança corporativa proporcionam maiores retornos e menor risco aos investidores ao compará-las com ações de empresas que não se comprometeram a adotar tais práticas. Para cumprir este objetivo são utilizados três modelos de otimização de portfolios. O primeiro modelo, o modelo Maxmin, maximiza o menor retorno mensal, enquanto o segundo maximiza o retorno anual. Já o terceiro modelo minimiza o desvio médio absoluto da carteira, que é considerado como uma medida de risco. Todos os modelos serão solucionados por métodos de programação linear (PL), em que não é considerado o número de ações da carteira, e de programação inteira mista (PIM), em que são inseridas restrições nos modelos que permitem especificar o número mínimo e máximo de ações. Os modelos são aplicados para uma carteira composta por ações que estão no IGC e para uma carteira formada por ações que estão no IBOVESPA. Os resultados obtidos para as duas carteiras são comparados, buscando evidenciar a idéia de que a boa governança corporativa está relacionada com maiores retornos e menores riscos. Neste sentido, o presente trabalho busca verificar empiricamente se, realmente, as ações de empresas com boa governança proporcionam maiores retornos e menor risco aos acionistas e, desta forma, fornecer novas informações que contribuam com o conhecimento e maior desenvolvimento do tema. Os resultados deste trabalho evidenciam o melhor desempenho da carteira formada pelas ações do IGC, que apresentaram maiores retornos e menores riscos. Diante destes resultados, há indícios de que o compromisso com práticas adicionais de boa governança corporativa pode estar proporcionando maior retorno e menor risco. / The objective of this work is to verify if shares of companies that adopt good corporate governance practice provides greater returns and lower risks to investors when compared with shares of companies that do not adopt these set of practices. Three optimization portfolios models were used to accomplish this objective. The first model, the maxmin model, maximizes the smallest monthly return, while the second maximizes the annual return. The third model minimizes the mean absolute deviation, which is considered a risk measure. All the models will be solved by linear programming (LP) methods, when it is not possible to determinate the number of shares in the portfolio, and mixed integer programming (MIP) methods, in which are inserted constraints that permit specify the minimum number and maximum number of shares in the models. The three models are applied to a portfolio formed by shares that are in IGC and to a portfolio formed by shares that are in IBOVESPA. The obtained results for both portfolios will be compared, willing to evidence the idea that good corporate governance is related with greater returns and lower risks. This study has the purpose to verify empirically if shares of companies with good governance provides greater returns and lower risks to investors and, this way, supplies new information that contribute with knowledge and greater development of the theme. The results of this work show that the better performance of portfolio formed by shares of IGC, that presented greater returns and lower risks. According to these results, there are indicators that the commitment with additional corporate governance practices can be providing greater returns and lower risks.

There are many real cases where a company needs to determine the price of its products so as to maximise its revenue or profit.<p>To do so, the company must consider customers' reactions to these prices, as they may refuse to buy a given product or service if its price is too high. This is commonly known in literature as a pricing problem.<p>This class of problems, which is typically bilevel, was first studied in the 1990s and is NP-hard, although polynomial algorithms do exist for some particular cases. Many questions are still open on this subject.<p><p>The aim of this thesis is to investigate mathematical properties of pricing problems, in order to find structural properties, formulations and solution methods that are as efficient as possible. In particular, we focus our attention on pricing problems over a network. In this framework, an authority owns a subset of arcs and imposes tolls on them, in an attempt to maximise his/her revenue, while users travel on the network, seeking for their minimum cost path.<p><p>First, we provide a detailed review of the state of the art on bilevel pricing problems. <p>Then, we consider a particular case where the authority is using an unit toll scheme on his/her subset of arcs, imposing either the same toll on all of them, or a toll proportional to a given parameter particular to each arc (for instance a per kilometre toll). We show that if tolls are all equal then the complexity of the problem is polynomial, whereas in case of proportional tolls it is pseudo-polynomial.<p>We then address a robust approach taking into account uncertainty on parameters. We solve some polynomial cases of the pricing problem where uncertainty is considered using an interval representation.<p><p>Finally, we focus on another particular case where toll arcs are connected such that they constitute a path, as occurs on highways. We develop a Dantzig-Wolfe reformulation and present a Branch-and-Cut-and-Price algorithm to solve it. Several improvements are proposed, both for the column generation algorithm used to solve the linear relaxation and for the branching part used to find integer solutions. Numerical results are also presented to highlight the efficiency of the proposed strategies. This problem is proved to be APX-hard and a theoretical comparison between our model and another one from the literature is carried out. / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Consider the problem of maximizing the revenue generated by tolls set on a subset <p>of arcs of a transportation network, where origin-destination flows (commodities) are assigned to shortest paths with respect to the sum of tolls and initial costs. <p>This thesis is concerned with a particular case of the above problem, in which all toll arcs are connected and constitute a path, as occurs on highways. Further, as toll levels are usually computed using the highway entry and exit points, a complete toll subgraph is considered, where each toll arc corresponds to a toll subpath. Two <p>variants of the problem are studied, with or without specific constraints linking together the tolls on the arcs. <p>The problem is modelled as a linear mixed integer program, and proved to be NP-hard. Next, several classes of valid inequalities are proposed, which strengthen important constraints of the initial model. Their efficiency is first shown theoretically, as these are facet defining for the restricted one and two commodity problems. <p>Also, we prove that some of the valid inequalities proposed, together with several <p>constraints of the linear program, provide a complete description of the convex hull <p>of feasible solutions for a single commodity problem. Numerical tests have also been conducted, and highlight the real efficiency of the valid inequalities for the multi-commodity case. Finally, we point out the links between the problem studied in the thesis and a more classical design and pricing problem in economics. /<p><p><p>Considérons le problème qui consiste à maximiser les profits issus de la tarification d’un sous-ensemble d’arcs d’un réseau de transport, où les flots origine-destination (produits) sont affectés aux plus courts chemins par rapport aux tarifs et aux coûts initiaux. Cette thèse porte sur une structure de réseau particulière du problème ci-dessus, dans laquelle tous les arcs tarifables sont connectés et forment un chemin, <p>comme c’est le cas sur une autoroute. Étant donné que les tarifs sont habituellement déterminés selon les points d’entrée et de sortie sur l’autoroute, nous considérons un sous-graphe tarifable complet, où chaque arc correspond en réalité à un sous-chemin. Deux variantes de ce problème sont étudiées, avec ou sans contraintes <p>spécifiques reliant les niveaux de tarifs sur les arcs. <p>Ce problème peut être modélisé comme un programme linéaire mixte entier. Nous prouvons qu’il est <p>NP-difficile. Plusieurs familles d’inégalités valides sont ensuite proposées, celles-ci renforçant certaines contraintes du modèle initial. Leur efficacité est d’abord démontrée de manière théorique, puisqu’il s’agit de facettes <p>des problèmes restreints à un ou deux produits. Certaines des inégalités valides proposées, ainsi que plusieurs contraintes du modèle initial, permettent aussi de donner une description complète de l’enveloppe convexe des solutions réalisables d’un problème restreint à un seul produit. Des tests numériques ont également <p>été menés, et mettent en évidence l’efficacité réelle des inégalités valides pour le problème général à plusieurs produits. Enfin, nous soulignons les liens entre le problème de tarification de réseau étudié dans cette thèse et un problème plus classique de tarification de produits en gestion. <p> / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Over-parameterized networks, where the number of parameters surpass the number of train-ing samples, generalize well on various tasks. However, large networks are computationally expensive in terms of the training and inference time. Furthermore, the lottery ticket hy-pothesis states that a subnetwork of a randomly initialized network can achieve marginal loss after training on a specific task compared to the original network. Therefore, there is a need to optimize the inference and training time, and a potential for more compact neural architectures. We introduce a novel approach “Optimizing ANN Architectures using Mixed-Integer Programming” (OAMIP) to find these subnetworks by identifying critical neurons and re-moving non-critical ones, resulting in a faster inference time. The proposed OAMIP utilizes a Mixed-Integer Program (MIP) for assigning importance scores to each neuron in deep neural network architectures. Our MIP is guided by the impact on the main learning task of the net-work when simultaneously pruning subsets of neurons. In concrete, the optimization of the objective function drives the solver to minimize the number of neurons, to limit the network to critical neurons, i.e., with high importance score, that need to be kept for maintaining the overall accuracy of the trained neural network. Further, the proposed formulation generalizes the recently considered lottery ticket hypothesis by identifying multiple “lucky” subnetworks, resulting in optimized architectures, that not only perform well on a single dataset, but also generalize across multiple ones upon retraining of network weights. Finally, we present a scalable implementation of our method by decoupling the importance scores across layers using auxiliary networks and across di˙erent classes. We demonstrate the ability of OAMIP to prune neural networks with marginal loss in accuracy and generalizability on popular datasets and architectures. / Les réseaux sur-paramétrés, où le nombre de paramètres dépasse le nombre de données, se généralisent bien sur diverses tâches. Cependant, les grands réseaux sont coûteux en termes d’entraînement et de temps d’inférence. De plus, l’hypothèse du billet de loterie indique qu’un sous-réseau d’un réseau initialisé de façon aléatoire peut atteindre une perte marginale après l’entrainement sur une tâche spécifique par rapport au réseau de référence. Par conséquent, il est nécessaire d’optimiser le temps d’inférence et d’entrainement, ce qui est possible pour des architectures neurales plus compactes. Nous introduisons une nouvelle approche “Optimizing ANN Architectures using Mixed-Integer Programming” (OAMIP) pour trouver ces sous-réseaux en identifiant les neurones importants et en supprimant les neurones non importants, ce qui permet d’accélérer le temps d’inférence. L’approche OAMIP proposée fait appel à un programme mixte en nombres entiers (MIP) pour attribuer des scores d’importance à chaque neurone dans les architectures de modèles profonds. Notre MIP est guidé par l’impact sur la principale tâche d’apprentissage du réseau en élaguant simultanément les neurones. En définissant soigneusement la fonction objective du MIP, le solveur aura une tendance à minimiser le nombre de neurones, à limiter le réseau aux neurones critiques, c’est-à-dire avec un score d’importance élevé, qui doivent être conservés pour maintenir la précision globale du réseau neuronal formé. De plus, la formulation proposée généralise l’hypothèse des billets de loterie récemment envisagée en identifiant de multiples sous-réseaux “chanceux”. Cela permet d’obtenir des architectures optimisées qui non seulement fonctionnent bien sur un seul ensemble de données, mais aussi se généralisent sur des di˙érents ensembles de données lors du recyclage des poids des réseaux. Enfin, nous présentons une implémentation évolutive de notre méthode en découplant les scores d’importance entre les couches à l’aide de réseaux auxiliaires et entre les di˙érentes classes. Nous démontrons la capacité de notre formulation à élaguer les réseaux de neurones avec une perte marginale de précision et de généralisabilité sur des ensembles de données et des architectures populaires.

A/B testing refers to the statistical procedure of experimental design and analysis to compare two treatments, A and B, applied to different testing subjects. It is widely used by technology companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Netflix, to compare different algorithms, web-designs, and other online products and services. The subjects participating in these online A/B testing experiments are users who are connected in different scales of social networks. Two connected subjects are similar in terms of their social behaviors, education and financial background, and other demographic aspects. Hence, it is only natural to assume that their reactions to online products and services are related to their network adjacency. In this research, we propose to use the conditional autoregressive model (CAR) to present the network structure and include the network effects in the estimation and inference of the treatment effect. The following statistical designs are presented: D-optimal design for network A/B testing, a re-randomization experimental design approach for network A/B testing and covariate-assisted Bayesian sequential design for network A/B testing. The effectiveness of the proposed methods are shown through numerical results with synthetic networks and real social networks.

<p>In the US, seven regional transmission organizations (RTOs) operate wholesale electricity markets within three largely independent transmission systems, the largest of which includes five RTO regions and many vertically integrated utilities.</p> <p>RTOs operate a day-ahead and a real-time market. In the day-ahead market, generation and demand-side resources are optimally scheduled based on bids and offers for the next day. Those schedules are adjusted according to actual operating conditions in the real-time market. Both markets involve a unit commitment calculation, a mixed integer program that determines which generators will be online, and an economic dispatch calculation, an optimization determines the output of each online generator for every interval and calculates locational marginal prices (LMPs).</p> <p>The use of LMPs for the management of congestion in RTO transmission systems has brought efficiency and transparency to the operation of electric power systems and provides price signals that highlight the need for investment in transmission and generation. Through this work, we aim to extend these efficiency and transparency gains to the coordination across RTOs. Existing market-based inter-regional coordination schemes are limited to incremental changes in real-time markets. </p> <p>We propose a multi-regional unit-commitment that enables coordination in the day-ahead timeframe by applying a distributed approach to approximate a system-wide optimal commitment and dispatch while allowing each region to largely maintain their own rules, model only internal transmission up to the boundary, and keep sensitive financial information confidential. A heuristic algorithm based on an extension of the alternating directions method of multipliers (ADMM) for the mixed integer program is applied to the unit commitment. </p> The proposed coordinated solution was simulated and compared to the ideal single-market scenario and to a representation of the current uncoordinated solution, achieving at least 58% of the maximum potential savings, which, in terms of the annual cost of electric generation in the US, could add up to nearly $7 billion per year. In addition to the coordinated day-ahead solution, we develop a distributed solution for financial transmission rights (FTR) auctions with minimal information sharing across RTOs that constitutes the first known work to provide a viable option for market participants to seamlessly hedge price variability exposure on cross-border transactions.

Aujourd’hui, la conception de réseaux est une problématique cruciale qui se pose dans beaucoup de domaines tels que le transport ou l’énergie. En particulier, il est devenu nécessaire d’optimiser la façon dont sont conçus les réseaux permettant de produire de l’énergie. On se concentre ici sur la production électrique produite à travers des parcs éoliens. Cette énergie apparait plus que jamais comme une bonne alternative à la production d’électricité via des centrales thermiques ou nucléaires.Nous nous intéressons dans cette thèse à la conception du câblage collectant l’énergie dans les parcs éoliens. On connaît alors la position de l’ensemble des éoliennes appartenant au parc ainsi que celle du site central collecteur vers laquelle l’énergie doit être acheminée. On connaît également la position des câbles que l’on peut construire, leurs capacités, et la position des nœuds d’interconnexion possibles. Il s’agit de déterminer un câblage de coût minimal permettant de relier l’ensemble des éoliennes à la sous-station, tel que celui-ci soit résistant à un certain nombre de pannes sur le réseau. / Nowadays, the design of networks has become a decisive problematic which appears in many fields such as transport or energy. In particular, it has become necessary and important to optimize the way in which networks used to produce, collect or transport energy are designed. We focus in this thesis on electricity produced through wind farms. The production of energy by wind turbines appears more than ever like a good alternative to the electrical production of thermal or nuclear power plants.We focus in this thesis on the design of the cabling network which allows to collect and route the energy from the wind turbines to a sub-station, linking the wind farm to the electrical network. In this problem, we know the location of each wind turbine of the farm and the one of the sub-station. We also know the location of possible inter-connection nodes which allow to connect different cables between them. Each wind turbine produces a known quantity of energy and with each cable are associated a cost and a capacity (the maximum amount of energy that can be routed through this cable). The optimizationproblem that we consider is to select a set of cables of minimum cost such that the energy produced from the wind turbines can be routed to the sub-station in the network induced by this set of cables, without exceeding the capacity of each cable. We focus on cabling networks resilient to breakdowns.

Le déséquilibre d'un sommet dans un graphe orienté est la valeur absolue de la différence entre son degré sortant et son degré entrant. Nous étudions le problème de trouver une orientation des arêtes du graphe telle que l'image du vecteur dont les composantes sont les déséquilibres des sommets par une fonction objectif f est maximisée. Le premier cas considéré est le problème de maximiser le minimum des déséquilibres sur toutes les orientations possibles. Nous caractérisons les graphes dont la valeur objective optimale est nulle. Ensuite nous donnons plusieurs résultats concernant la complexité du problème. Enfin, nous introduisons différentes formulations du problème et présentons quelques résultats numériques. Par la suite, nous montrons que le cas f=1/2 | |·| |₁ mène au célèbre problème de la coupe de cardinalité maximale. Nous introduisons de nouvelles formulations ainsi qu'un nouveau majorant qui domine celui de Goemans et Williamson. Des résultats théoriques et numériques concernant la performance des approches sont présentés. Pour finir, dans le but de renforcer certaines des formulations des problèmes étudiés, nous étudions une famille de polyèdres spécifique consistant en l'enveloppe convexe des matrices d'affectation 0/1 (où chaque colonne contient exactement une composante égale à 1) annexée avec l'indice de leur ligne non-identiquement nulle la plus basse. Nous donnons une description complète de ce polytope ainsi que certaines de ses variantes qui apparaissent naturellement dans le contexte de divers problèmes d'optimisation combinatoire. Nous montrons également que résoudre un programme linéaire sur un tel polytope peut s'effectuer en temps polynomial / The imbalance of a vertex in a directed graph is the absolute value of the difference between its outdegree and indegree. In this thesis we study the problem of orienting the edges of a graph in such a way that the image of the vector which components are the imbalances of the vertices of the graph under an objective function f is maximized. The first case considered is the problem of maximizing the minimum imbalance of all the vertices over all the possible orientations of the input graph. We first characterize graphs for which the optimal objective value is zero. Next we give several results concerning the computational complexity of the problem. Finally, we deal with several mixed integer programming formulations for this problem and present some numerical experiments. Next, we show that the case for f=1/2 | |·| |₁ leads to the famous unweighted maximum cut problem. We introduce some new formulations along with a new bound shown to be tighter than Michel Goemans & David Williamson's. Theoretical and computational results regarding bounds quality and performance are also reported. Finally, in order to strengthen some formulations of the studied problems, we study a specific class of polytopes. Consider the polytope consisting in the convex hull of the 0/1 assignment matrices where each column contains exactly one coefficient equal to 1 appended with their index of the lowest row that is not identically equal to the zero row. We give a full description of this polytope and some of its variants which naturally appear in the context of several combinatorial optimization problems. We also show that linear optimization over those polytopes can be done in polynomial time

Pour les opérateurs, les réseaux FTTH représentent à la fois la solution de référence pour répondre à la demande croissante de trafic fixe, et un investissement considérable dû à leur mise en place. Le but de ces travaux est d'assurer le déploiement de réseaux de qualité à moindre coût. Nous commençons à présenter les différents aspects de la planification de ces réseaux qui en font un problème complexe. La littérature concernée est abordée afin d'exhiber les nouveaux défis que nous relevons. Puis nous élaborons des stratégies permettant de trouver la meilleure solution dans différents contextes. Plusieurs politiques de maintenance ou d'utilisation du génie civil sont ainsi explorées. Les problèmes rencontrés sont analysés à la lumière de divers outils d'optimisation (programmation entière, inégalités valides, programmation dynamique, approximations, complexités, inapproximabilité...) que nous utilisons et développons selon nos besoins. Les solutions proposées ont été testées et validées sur des instances réelles, et ont pour but d'être utilisées par Orange / For operators, FTTH networks are the most widespread solution to the increasing traffic demand. Their layout requires a huge investment. The aim of this work is to ensure a cost effective deployment of quality networks. We start by presenting aspects of this network design problem which make it a complex problem. The related literature is reviewed to highlight the novel issues that we solve. Then, we elaborate strategies to find the best solution in different contexts. Several policies regarding maintenance or civil engineering use will be investigated. The problems encountered are tackled using several combinatorial optimization tools (integer programming, valid inequalities, dynamic programming, approximations, complexity theory, inapproximability…) which will be developed according to our needs. The proposed solutions were tested and validated on real-life instances, and are meant to be implemented in a network planning tool from Orange