Finding discrete global minima with a filled function for integer programming

The filled function method is an approach to find the global minimum of multidimensional functions. This paper proposes a new definition of the filled function for integer programming problem. A filled function which satisfies this definition is presented. Furthermore, we discuss the properties of the filled function and design a new filled function algorithm. Numerical experiments on several test problems with up to 50 integer variables have demonstrated the applicability and efficiency of the proposed method.