David L. Woodruff Although stochastic programming is a powerful tool for modeling decision-making under uncertainty, various impediments have historically prevented its wide-spread use. One key factor involves the ability of non-specialists to easily express stochastic programming problems as extensions of deterministic models, which are often formulated first. A second key factor relates to the difficulty of solving stochastic … Read more
We describe Pyomo, an open source tool for modeling optimization applications in Python. Pyomo can be used to de fine symbolic problems, create concrete problem instances, and solve these instances with standard solvers. Pyomo provides a capability that is commonly associated with algebraic modeling languages such as AMPL, AIMMS, and GAMS, but Pyomo’s modeling objects are … Read more
Progressive hedging (PH) is a scenario-based decomposition technique for solving stochastic programs. While PH has been successfully applied to a number of problems, a variety of issues arise when implementing PH in practice, especially when dealing with very difficult or large-scale mixed-integer problems. In particular, decisions must be made regarding the value of the penalty … Read more
We describe computational procedures to solve a wide-ranging class of stochastic programs with chance constraints where the random components of the problem are discretely distributed. Our procedures are based on a combination of Lagrangian relaxation and scenario decomposition, which we solve using a novel variant of Rockafellar and Wets’ progressive hedging algorithm. Experiments demonstrate the … Read more