I have been working on a vehicle routing problem in which the truck transports several commodities, but these are measured in different units. Hence, we know the capacity of the truck for each of these commodities alone, but we don’t know how to convert them into one another so that we can load two commodities and still respect the capacity.
Category Archives: mathematical programming
How to linearize max, min, and abs functions
In this post you will see how to linearize max functions, min functions, and absolute value functions. These can be expressed mathematically as:
Linearization of the product of two variables
Often when writing a model, the most straightforward way of writing a constraint is by multiplying two variables. Then, in order to solve the model we need to linearize it. There comes the problem, as I always have problems reminding how to linearize a product of variables.
Linearizing the product of two binary variables
Suppose your model has the product
