Jannis Kurtz In the realm of robust optimization the k-adaptability approach is one promising method to derive approximate solutions for two-stage robust optimization problems. Instead of allowing all possible second-stage decisions, the k-adaptability approach aims at calculating a limited set of k such decisions already in the first-stage before the uncertainty reveals. The parameter k can be … Read more
The concept of counterfactual explanations (CE) has emerged as one of the important concepts to understand the inner workings of complex AI systems. In this paper, we translate the idea of CEs to linear optimization and propose, motivate, and analyze three different types of CEs: strong, weak, and relative. While deriving strong and weak CEs … Read more
Bilevel optimization deals with nested problems in which a leader takes the first decision to minimize their objective function while accounting for a follower best-response reaction. Constrained bilevel problems with integer variables are particularly notorious for their hardness. While exact solvers have been proposed for mixed-integer~linear bilevel optimization, they tend to scale poorly with problem … Read more
Robust optimization provides a mathematical framework for modeling and solving decision-making problems under worst-case uncertainty. This work addresses two-stage robust optimization (2RO) problems (also called adjustable robust optimization), wherein first-stage and second-stage decisions are made before and after uncertainty is realized, respectively. This results in a nested min-max-min optimization problem which is extremely challenging computationally, … Read more
Robust and bilevel optimization share the common feature that they involve a certain multilevel structure. Hence, although they model something rather different when used in practice, they seem to have a similar mathematical structure. In this paper, we analyze the connections between different types of robust problems (static robust problems with and without decision-dependence of … Read more
In this work we investigate the min-max-min robust optimization problem and the k-adaptability robust optimization problem for binary problems with uncertain costs. The idea of the first approach is to calculate a set of k feasible solutions which are worst-case optimal if in each possible scenario the best of the k solutions is implemented. It … Read more
We study iterative methods for (two-stage) robust combinatorial optimization problems with discrete uncertainty. We propose a machine-learning-based heuristic to determine starting scenarios that provide strong lower bounds. To this end, we design dimension-independent features and train a Random Forest Classifier on small-dimensional instances. Experiments show that our method improves the solution process for larger instances … Read more