A survey of adjustable robust optimization

In this survey, we discuss the state of the art of robust combinatorial optimization under uncertain cost functions. We summarize complexity results presented in the literature for various underlying problems, with the aim of pointing out the connections between the different results and approaches, and with a special emphasis on the role of the chosen uncertainty sets. Moreover, we give an overview over exact solution methods for NP-hard cases. While mostly concentrating on the classical concept of strict robustness, we also cover more recent two-stage optimization paradigms.

Robust combinatorial optimization under convex and discrete cost uncertainty

In the paper “Robust Dual Dynamic Programming,” Angelos Georghiou, Angelos Tsoukalas, and Wolfram Wiesemann propose a novel solution scheme for addressing planning problems with long horizons. Such...

Robust Dual Dynamic Programming

We study two-stage robust optimization problems with mixed discrete-continuous decisions in both stages. Despite their broad range of applications, these problems pose two fundamental challenges: (i) they constitute infinite-dimensional problems that require a finite-dimensional approximation, and (ii) the presence of discrete recourse decisions typically prohibits duality-based solution schemes. We address the first challenge by studying a $K$-adaptability formulation that selects $K$ candidate recourse policies before observing the realization of the uncertain parameters and that implements the best of these policies after the realization is known. We address the second challenge through a branch-and-bound scheme that enjoys asymptotic convergence in general and finite convergence under specific conditions. We illustrate the performance of our algorithm in numerical experiments involving benchmark data from several application domains.

K-Adaptability in Two-Stage Mixed-Integer Robust Optimization

Dynamic decision-making under uncertainty has a long and distinguished history in operations research. Due to the curse of dimensionality, solution schemes that naively partition or discretize the support of the random problem parameters are limited to small and medium-sized problems, or they require restrictive modeling assumptions (e.g., absence of recourse actions). In the last few decades, several solution techniques have been proposed that aim to alleviate the curse of dimensionality. Amongst these is the decision rule approach, which faithfully models the random process and instead approximates the feasible region of the decision problem. In this paper, we survey the major theoretical findings relating to this approach, and we investigate its potential in two applications areas.

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The decision rule approach to optimization under uncertainty: methodology and applications

We present in this paper a general decomposition framework to solve exactly adjustable robust linear optimization problems subject to poly-tope uncertainty. Our approach is based on replacing the polytope by the set of its extreme points and generating the extreme points on the fly within row generation or column-and-row generation algorithms. The novelty of our approach lies in formulating the separation problem as a feasibility problem instead of a max-min problem as done in recent works. Applying the Farkas lemma, we can reformulate the separation problem as a bilinear program, which is then linearized to obtained a mixed-integer linear programming formulation. We compare the two algorithms on a robust telecommunications network design under demand uncertainty and budgeted uncertainty polytope. Our results show that the relative performance of the algorithms depend on whether the budget is integer or fractional.

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Josette Ayoub

Papers

Decomposition for adjustable robust linear optimization subject to uncertainty polytope