Eliciting the utility of a decision maker is difficult. In this paper, we develop a flexible decision making framework, which uses the concept of utility robustness to address the problem of ambiguity and inconsistency in utility assessments. The ideas are developed by giving a probabilistic interpretation to utility and marginal utility functions. Boundary and additional … Read more
This paper deals with the problem of determining the optimal size of a residential grid-connected photovoltaic system to meet a certain CO2 reduction target at a minimum cost. Ren et al. proposed a novel approach using a simple linear programming that minimizes the total energy costs for residential buildings in Japan. However, their approach is … Read more
This paper studies the vehicle routing problem with time windows where travel times are uncertain and belong to a predetermined polytope. The objective of the problem is to find a set of routes that services all nodes of the graph and that are feasible for all values of the travel times in the uncertainty polytope. … Read more
Power grid vulnerability analysis is often performed through solving a bi-level optimization problem, which, if solved to optimality, yields the most destructive interdiction plan with the worst loss. As one of the most effective operations to mitigate deliberate outages or attacks, transmission line switching recently has been included and modeled by a binary variable in … Read more
In this paper, we consider a linear two-stage robust optimization model with a mixed integer recourse problem. Currently, this type of two-stage robust optimization model does not have any exact solution algorithm available. We first present a set of sufficient conditions under which the existence of an optimal solution is guaranteed. Then, we present a … Read more
Dynamic decision-making under uncertainty has a long and distinguished history in operations research. Due to the curse of dimensionality, solution schemes that naively partition or discretize the support of the random problem parameters are limited to small and medium-sized problems, or they require restrictive modeling assumptions (e.g., absence of recourse actions). In the last few … Read more
This paper introduces novel numerical solution strategies for generalized semi-infinite optimization problems (GSIP), a class of mathematical optimization problems which occur naturally in the context of design centering problems, robust optimization problems, and many fields of engineering science. GSIPs can be regarded as bilevel optimization problems, where a parametric lower-level maximization problem has to be … Read more
Schedule disruptions are commonplace in the airline industry with many flight-delaying events occurring each day. Recently there has been a focus on introducing robustness into airline planning stages to reduce the effect of these disruptions. We propose a recoverable robustness technique as an alternative to robust optimisation to reduce the effect of disruptions and the … Read more
Two nonlinear Kalman smoothers are proposed using the Student’s t distribution. The first, which we call the T-Robust smoother, finds the maximum a posteriori (MAP) solution for Gaussian process noise and Student’s t observation noise. It is extremely robust against outliers, outperforming the recently proposed L1-Laplace smoother in extreme situations with data containing 20% or … Read more
We introduce a framework for robustifying portfolio selection problems with respect to ambiguity in the distribution of the random asset losses. In particular, we are interested in convex, version independent risk measures. To robustify these risk measures, we use an ambiguity set which is defined as a neighborhood around a reference probability measure which represents … Read more