Distributionally robust chance constrained programs minimize a deterministic cost function subject to the satisfaction of one or more safety conditions with high probability, given that the probability distribution of the uncertain problem parameters affecting the safety condition(s) is only known to belong to some ambiguity set. We study two popular approximation schemes for distributionally robust … Read more
This paper studies duality and optimality conditions for general convex stochastic optimization problems. The main result gives sufficient conditions for the absence of a duality gap and the existence of dual solutions in a locally convex space of random variables. It implies, in particular, the necessity of scenario-wise optimality conditions that are behind many fundamental … Read more
The astonishing dimensions and complexity of power systems render them impossible to be managed without the help of cutting-edge software. Due to a lack of scalable, reliable and well documented free and open-source solutions, system operators, regulators, and government agencies often rely on proprietary software to provide them information that ultimately will be used to … Read more
Network data envelopment analysis (NDEA) is an extension of standard data envelopment analysis that models the efficiency assessment of DMUs by considering their internal structure. While in standard DEA the DMU is regarded as a single process, in NDEA the DMU is viewed as a network of interconnected sub-processes (stages, divisions), where the flow of … Read more
We study supervised learning problems for predicting properties of individuals who belong to one of two demographic groups, and we seek predictors that are fair according to statistical parity. This means that the distributions of the predictions within the two groups should be close with respect to the Kolmogorov distance, and fairness is achieved by … Read more
Robust controllers that stabilize dynamical systems even under disturbances and noise are often formulated as solutions of nonsmooth, nonconvex optimization problems. While methods such as gradient sampling can handle the nonconvexity and nonsmoothness, the costs of evaluating the objective function may be substantial, making robust control challenging for dynamical systems with high-dimensional state spaces. In … Read more
We consider a robust optimization problem with continuous decision-dependent uncertainty (RO-CDDU), which has two new features: an uncertainty set linearly dependent on continuous decision variables and a convex piecewise-linear objective function. We prove that RO-CDDU is strongly NP-hard in general and reformulate it into an equivalent mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP) with a decomposable structure to … Read more
While most methods for solving mixed-integer optimization problems compute a single optimal solution, a diverse set of near-optimal solutions can often lead to improved outcomes. We present a new method for finding a set of diverse solutions by emphasizing diversity within the search for near-optimal solutions. Specifically, within a branch-and-bound framework, we investigated parameterized node … Read more
In recent years, robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) have emerged as a prominent modeling framework for dynamic decision problems affected by uncertainty. In contrast to classical MDPs, which only account for stochasticity by modeling the dynamics through a stochastic process with a known transition kernel, robust MDPs additionally account for ambiguity by optimizing in view … Read more
Optimization problems in operations and finance often include a cost that is proportional to the expected amount by which a random variable exceeds some fixed quantity, known as the expected loss function. Representation of this function often leads to computational challenges, depending on the distribution of the random variable of interest. Moreover, in practice, a … Read more