Risk-Averse Bargaining in a Stochastic Optimization Context

Problem definition: Bargaining situations are ubiquitous in economics and management. We consider the problem of bargaining for a fair ex-ante distribution of random profits arising from a cooperative effort of a fixed set of risk-averse agents. Our approach integrates optimal managerial decision making into bargaining situations with random outcomes and explicitly models the impact of … Read more

Equal Risk Pricing and Hedging of Financial Derivatives with Convex Risk Measures

In this paper, we consider the problem of equal risk pricing and hedging in which the fair price of an option is the price that exposes both sides of the contract to the same level of risk. Focusing for the first time on the context where risk is measured according to convex risk measures, we … Read more

Nonconvex Constrained Optimization by a Filtering Branch and Bound

A major difficulty in optimization with nonconvex constraints is to find feasible solutions. As simple examples show, the alphaBB-algorithm for single-objective optimization may fail to compute feasible solutions even though this algorithm is a popular method in global optimization. In this work, we introduce a filtering approach motivated by a multiobjective reformulation of the constrained … Read more

Games with distributionally robust joint chance constraints

This paper studies an n-player non-cooperative game with strategy sets defined by stochastic linear constraints. The stochastic constraints of each player are jointly satisfied with a probability exceeding a given threshold. We consider the case where the row vectors defining the constraints are independent random vectors whose probability distributions are not completely known and belong … Read more

Dynamic programming for the time-dependent traveling salesman problem with time windows

The recent growth of direct-to-consumer deliveries has stressed the importance of last-mile logistics, becoming one of the critical factors in city planning. One of the key factors lies in the last-mile deliveries, reaching in some cases nearly 50% of the overall parcel delivery cost. Different variants of the the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) arise … Read more

The Fermat Rule for Set Optimization Problems with Lipschitzian Set-Valued Mappings

n this paper, we consider set optimization problems with respect to the set approach. Specifically, we deal with the lower less and the upper less set relations. First, we derive properties of convexity and Lipschitzianity of suitable scalarizing functionals, under the same assumption on the set-valued objective mapping. We then obtain upper estimates of the … Read more

Automatic generation of FPTASes for stochastic monotone dynamic programs made easier

In this paper we go one step further in the automatic generation of FPTASes for multi-stage stochastic dynamic programs with scalar state and action spaces, in where the cost-to-go functions have a monotone structure in the state variable. While there exist a few frameworks for automatic generation of FPTASes, so far none of them is … Read more

Proximity measures based on KKT points for constrained multi-objective optimization

An important aspect of optimization algorithms, for instance evolutionary algorithms, are termination criteria that measure the proximity of the found solution to the optimal solution set. A frequently used approach is the numerical verification of necessary optimality conditions such as the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. In this paper, we present a proximity measure which characterizes the … Read more

Expensive multi-objective optimization of electromagnetic mixing in a liquid metal

This paper presents a novel trust-region method for the optimization of multiple expensive functions. We apply this method to a biobjective optimization problem in fluid mechanics, the optimal mixing of particles in a flow in a closed container. The three-dimensional time-dependent flows are driven by Lorentz forces that are generated by an oscillating permanent magnet … Read more

Gaddum’s test for symmetric cones

A real symmetric matrix “A” is copositive if the inner product if Ax and x is nonnegative for all x in the nonnegative orthant. Copositive programming has attracted a lot of attention since Burer showed that hard nonconvex problems can be formulated as completely-positive programs. Alas, the power of copositive programming is offset by its … Read more