Experiments with Two-Row Cuts from Degenerate Tableaux

Abstract

There has been a recent interest in cutting planes generated from two or more rows of the optimal simplex tableau. One can construct examples of integer programs for which a single cutting plane generated from two rows dominates the entire split closure. Motivated by these theoretical results, we study the effect of adding a family of cutting planes generated from two rows on a set of instances from the MIPLIB library. The conclusion of whether these cuts are competitive with Gomory mixed-integer cuts is very sensitive to the experimental setup. In particular, we consider the issue of reliability versus aggressiveness of the cut generators, an issue that is usually not addressed in the literature.