Optimization with absolute values

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Authors: Matthew Chan (mdc297), Yilian Yin (), Brian Amado (ba392), Peter (pmw99), Dewei Xiao (dx58) - SYSEN 5800 Fall 2020

Steward: Fengqi You


Numerical Example

We replace the absolute value quantities with a single variable:

We must introduce additional constraints to ensure we do not lose any information by doing this substitution:

The problem has now been reformulated as a linear programming problem that can be solved normally:

The optimum value for the objective function is , which occurs when and and .