Chapter 5 The characteristic equation for linear integer programs

This chapter develops an innovative relation, called the characteristic equation (CE) for solving a pure integer program (PIP) and illustrates how the characteristic equation not only finds an optimal integer solution to a PIP but it also can find the ordered kth best, k ≥ 2 optimal solution, which is a feature not available to other approaches. The CE approach has been discussed for pure integer, binary integer, and mixed-integer models. A potential application of CE in context of a biobjective and multi-objective models has been pointed out.