Distributionally Robust Chance Constrained $p$-Hub Center Problem

The $p$-hub center problem is a fundamental model for the strategic design of hub location. It aims at constructing $p$ fully interconnected hubs and links from nodes to hubs so that the longest path between any two nodes is minimized. Existing literature on the $p$-hub center problem under uncertainty often assumes a joint distribution of … Read more

Distributionally Robust Disaster Relief Planning under the Wasserstein Set

We study a two-stage natural disaster management problem modeled as a stochastic program, where the first stage consists of a facility location problem, deciding where to open facilities and pre-allocate resources such as medical and food kits, and the second stage is a fixed-charge transportation problem, routing resources to affected areas after observing a disaster. … Read more

The Null Space Property of the Weighted $\ell_r-\ell_1$ Minimization

The null space property (NSP), which relies merely on the null space of the sensing matrix column space, has drawn numerous interests in sparse signal recovery. This article studies NSP of the weighted $\ell_r-\ell_1$ minimization. Several versions of NSP of the weighted $\ell_r-\ell_1$ minimization including the weighted $\ell_r-\ell_1$ NSP, the weighted $\ell_r-\ell_1$ stable NSP, the … Read more

Two-Stage Robust Optimization with Decision Dependent Uncertainty

The type of decision dependent uncertainties (DDUs) imposes a great challenge in decision making, while existing methodologies are not sufficient to support many real practices. In this paper, we present a systematic study to handle this challenge in two-stage robust optimization~(RO). Our main contributions include three sophisticated variants of column-and-constraint generation method to exactly compute … Read more

On the Sparsity of Optimal Linear Decision Rules for a Class of Robust Optimization Problems with Box Uncertainty Sets

We consider a class of production-inventory problems with box uncertainty sets from the seminal work of Ben-Tal et al. (2004) on linear decision rules in robust optimization. We prove that there always exists an optimal linear decision rule for this class of problems in which the number of nonzero parameters in the linear decision rule … Read more

Ensemble Methods for Robust Support Vector Machines using Integer Programming

In this work we study binary classification problems where we assume that our training data is subject to uncertainty, i.e. the precise data points are not known. To tackle this issue in the field of robust machine learning the aim is to develop models which are robust against small perturbations in the training data. We … Read more

Portfolio optimization in the presence of estimation errors on the expected asset returns

It is well known that the classical Markowitz model for portfolio optimization is extremely sensitive to estimation errors on the expected asset returns. Robust optimization mitigates this issue. We focus on ellipsoidal uncertainty sets around the point estimates of the expected asset returns. We investigate the performance of diagonal estimation-error matrices in the description of … Read more

Fleet & tail assignment under uncertainty

Airlines solve many different optimization problems and combine the resulting solutions to ensure smooth, minimum-cost operations. Crucial problems are the Fleet Assignment, which assigns aircraft types to flights of a given schedule, and the Tail Assignment, which determines individual flight sequences to be performed by single aircraft. In order to find a cost-optimal solution, many … Read more

Minkowski Centers via Robust Optimization: Computation and Applications

Centers of convex sets are geometric objects that have received extensive attention in the mathematical and optimization literature, both from a theoretical and practical standpoint. For instance, they serve as initialization points for many algorithms such as interior-point, hit-and-run, or cutting-planes methods. First, we observe that computing a Minkowski center of a convex set can be formulated as … Read more

Bounds for Multistage Mixed-Integer Distributionally Robust Optimization

Multistage mixed-integer distributionally robust optimization (DRO) forms a class of extremely challenging problems since their size grows exponentially with the number of stages. One way to model the uncertainty in multistage DRO is by creating sets of conditional distributions (the so-called conditional ambiguity sets) on a finite scenario tree and requiring that such distributions remain … Read more