Dick den Hertog In optimization problems appearing in fields such as economics, finance, or engineering, it is often important that a risk measure of a decision-dependent random variable stays below a prescribed level. At the same time, the underlying probability distribution determining the risk measure’s value is typically known only up to a certain degree and the constraint … Read more
Adjustable robust optimization (ARO) is a technique to solve dynamic (multistage) optimization problems. In ARO, the decision in each stage is a function of the information accumulated from the previous periods on the values of the uncertain parameters. This information, however, is often inaccurate; there is much evidence in the information management literature that even … Read more
This article presents a novel combination of robust optimization developed in mathematical programming, and robust parameter design developed in statistical quality control. Robust parameter design uses metamodels estimated from experiments with both controllable and environmental inputs (factors). These experiments may be performed with either real or simulated systems; we focus on simulation experiments. For the … Read more
We propose a new way to derive tractable robust counterparts of a linear program by using the theory of Beck and Ben-Tal (2009) on the duality between the robust (“pessimistic”) primal problem and its “optimistic” dual. First, we obtain a new {\it convex} reformulation of the dual problem of a robust linear program, and then … Read more
In this paper we provide a systematic way to construct the robust counterpart of a nonlinear uncertain inequality that is concave in the uncertain parameters. We use convex analysis (support functions, conjugate functions, Fenchel duality) and conic duality in order to convert the robust counterpart into an explicit and computationally tractable set of constraints. It … Read more
This paper adresses the robust counterparts of optimization problems containing sums of maxima of linear functions and proposes several reformulations. These problems include many practical problems, e.g. problems with sums of absolute values, and arise when taking the robust counterpart of a linear inequality that is affine in the decision variables, affine in a parameter … Read more
The paper identifies classes of nonconvex optimization problems whose convex relaxations have optimal solutions which at the same time are global optimal solutions of the original nonconvex problems. Such a hidden convexity property was so far limited to quadratically constrained quadratic problems with one or two constraints. We extend it here to problems with some … Read more
In this paper we focus on robust linear optimization problems with uncertainty regions defined by phi-divergences (for example, chi-squared, Hellinger, Kullback-Leibler). We show how uncertainty regions based on phi-divergences arise in a natural way as confidence sets if the uncertain parameters contain elements of a probability vector. Such problems frequently occur in, for example, optimization … Read more
We show that the robust counterpart of a convex quadratic constraint with ellipsoidal implementation error is equivalent to a system of conic quadratic constraints. To prove this result we first derive a sharper result for the S-lemma in case the two matrices involved can be simultaneously diagonalized. This extension of the S-lemma may also be … Read more
We consider the problem of minimizing a univariate, real-valued function f on an interval [a,b]. When f is a polynomial, we review how this problem may be reformulated as a semidefinite programming (SDP) problem, and review how to extract all global minimizers from the solution of the SDP problem. For general f, we approximate the … Read more