Thinner is not Always Better: Cascade Knapsack Problems

Abstract

In the context of branch-and-bound (B&B) for integer programming (IP) problems, a direction along which the polyhedron of the IP has minimum width is termed a thin direction. We demonstrate that a thin direction need not always be a good direction to branch on for solving the problem efficiently. Further, the integer width, which is the number of B&B nodes created when branching on the direction, may also not be an accurate indicator of good branching directions.