Robust Optimization

Robustification of the k-Means Clustering Problem and Tailored Decomposition Methods: When More Conservative Means More Accurate

  • Jan Pablo Burgard
  • Carina Moreira Costa
  • Martin Schmidt
    • Categories (Mixed) Integer Nonlinear Programming, Robust Optimization Tags , , , ,

    k-means clustering is a classic method of unsupervised learning with the aim of partitioning a given number of measurements into k clusters. In many modern applications, however, this approach suffers from unstructured measurement errors because the k-means clustering result then represents a clustering of the erroneous measurements instead of retrieving the true underlying clustering structure. … Read more

    Reliable Frequency Regulation through Vehicle-to-Grid: Encoding Legislation with Robust Constraints

  • Dirk Lauinger
  • François Vuille
  • Daniel Kuhn
    • Categories Applications - OR and Management Sciences, Applications - Science and Engineering, Robust Optimization Tags , , , , ,

    Problem definition: Vehicle-to-grid increases the low utilization rate of privately owned electric vehicles by making their batteries available to electricity grids. We formulate a robust optimization problem that maximizes a vehicle owner’s expected profit from selling primary frequency regulation to the grid and guarantees that market commitments are met at all times for all frequency … Read more

    Regret in the Newsvendor Model with Demand and Yield Randomness

  • Zhi Chen
  • Weijun Xie
    • Categories Robust Optimization Tags , , , , ,

    We study the fundamental stochastic newsvendor model that considers both demand and yield randomness. It is usually difficult in practice to describe precisely the joint demand and yield distribution, although partial statistical information and empirical data about this ambiguous distribution are often accessible. We combat the issue of distributional ambiguity by taking a data-driven distributionally … Read more

    On Linear Optimization over Wasserstein Balls

  • Daniel Kuhn
  • Wolfram Wiesemann
  • Man-Chung Yue
    • Categories Robust Optimization, Stochastic Programming Tags , , , ,

    Wasserstein balls, which contain all probability measures within a pre-specified Wasserstein distance to a reference measure, have recently enjoyed wide popularity in the distributionally robust optimization and machine learning communities to formulate and solve data-driven optimization problems with rigorous statistical guarantees. In this technical note we prove that the Wasserstein ball is weakly compact under … Read more

    A Robust Optimization Approach to Network Control Using Local Information Exchange

  • Georgios Darivianakis
  • Angelos Georghiou
  • Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh
  • John Lygeros
    • Categories Robust Optimization Tags

    Designing policies for a network of agents is typically done by formulating an optimization problem where each agent has access to state measurements of all the other agents in the network. Such policy designs with centralized information exchange results in optimization problems that are typically hard to solve, require to establish substantial communication links, and … Read more

    Dual Decomposition of Two-Stage Distributionally Robust Mixed-Integer Programming under the Wasserstein Ambiguity Set

  • Kibaek Kim
    • Categories (Mixed) Integer Linear Programming, Robust Optimization, Stochastic Programming Tags , ,

    We develop a dual decomposition of two-stage distributionally robust mixed-integer programming (DRMIP) under the Wasserstein ambiguity set. The dual decomposition is based on the Lagrangian dual of DRMIP, which results from the Lagrangian relaxation of the nonanticipativity constraints and min-max inequality. We present two Lagrangian dual problem formulations, each of which is based on different principle. We show … Read more

    Distributionally Robust Optimization Approaches for a Stochastic Mobile Facility Routing and Scheduling Problem

  • Karmel S. Shehadeh
    • Categories (Mixed) Integer Linear Programming, Facility Planning and Design, Robust Optimization Tags , , , ,

    We study a mobile facility (MF) routing and scheduling problem in which probability distributions of the time-dependent demand for MF services is unknown. To address distributional ambiguity, we propose and analyze two distributionally robust MF routing and scheduling (DMFRS) models that seek to minimize the fixed cost of establishing the MF fleet and maximum expected … Read more

    Distributionally Robust Optimization under Distorted Expectations

  • Jun Cai
  • Jonathan Yu-Meng Li
  • Tiantian Mao
    • Categories Applications - OR and Management Sciences, Robust Optimization, Stochastic Programming Tags , , ,

    Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has arose as an important paradigm to address the issue of distributional ambiguity in decision optimization. In its standard form, DRO seeks an optimal solution against the worst-possible expected value evaluated based on a set of candidate distributions. In the case where a decision maker is not risk neutral, the most … Read more

    The Value of Randomized Strategies in Distributionally Robust Risk Averse Network Interdiction Games

  • Erick Delage
  • Utsav Sadana
    • Categories Applications - OR and Management Sciences, Game Theory, Robust Optimization Tags , , ,

    Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) is widely used to account for the preferences of a risk-averse agent in the extreme loss scenarios. To study the effectiveness of randomization in interdiction games with an interdictor that is both risk and ambiguity averse, we introduce a distributionally robust network interdiction game where the interdictor randomizes over the … Read more

    Multistage Distributionally Robust Mixed-Integer Programming with Decision-Dependent Moment-Based Ambiguity Sets

  • Siqian Shen
  • Xian Yu
    • Categories (Mixed) Integer Nonlinear Programming, Robust Optimization, Stochastic Programming Tags , , , ,

    We study multistage distributionally robust mixed-integer programs under endogenous uncertainty, where the probability distribution of stage-wise uncertainty depends on the decisions made in previous stages. We first consider two ambiguity sets defined by decision-dependent bounds on the first and second moments of uncertain parameters and by mean and covariance matrix that exactly match decision-dependent empirical … Read more