A diving heuristic for mixed-integer problems with unbounded semi-continuous variables

Semi-continuous decision variables arise naturally in many real-world applications. They are defined to take either value zero or any value within a specified range, and occur mainly to prevent small nonzero values in the solution. One particular challenge that can come with semi-continuous variables in practical models is that their upper bound may be large or even infinite. In this article, we briefly discuss these challenges, and present a new diving heuristic tailored for mixed-integer optimization problems with general semi-continuous variables. The heuristic is designed to work independently of whether the semi-continuous variables are bounded from above, and thus circumvents the specific difficulties that come with unbounded semi-continuous variables. We conduct extensive computational experiments on three different test sets, integrating the heuristic in an open-source MIP solver. The results indicate that this heuristic is a successful tool for finding high-quality solutions in negligible time. At the root node the primal gap is reduced by an average of 5% up to 21%, and considering the overall performance improvement, the primal integral is reduced by 2% to 17% on average.