Large neighbourhood Benders’ search

A general enhancement of the Benders’ decomposition algorithm can be achieved through the improved use of large neighbourhood search heuristics within mixed-integer programming solvers. While mixed-integer programming solvers are endowed with an array of large neighbourhood search heuristics, their use is typically limited to finding solutions to the Benders’ decomposition master problem, which may be … Read more

Bicriteria Approximation of Chance Constrained Covering Problems

A chance constrained optimization problem involves constraints with random data which can be violated with probability bounded above by a prespecified small risk parameter. Such constraints are used to model reliability requirements in a variety of application areas such as finance, energy, service and manufacturing. Except under very special conditions, chance constrained problems are extremely … Read more

Solving joint chance constrained problems using regularization and Benders’ decomposition

We consider stochastic programs with joint chance constraints with discrete random distribution. We reformulate the problem by adding auxiliary variables. Since the resulting problem has a non-regular feasible set, we regularize it by increasing the feasible set. We solve the regularized problem by iteratively solving a master problem while adding Benders’ cuts in a slave … Read more

Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Optimization and Variation Regularization

Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has recently achieved empirical success for various applications in operations research and machine learning, owing partly to its regularization effect. Although the connection between Wasserstein DRO and regularization has been established in several settings, existing results often require restrictive assumptions, such as smoothness or convexity, that are not satisfied by … Read more

A Stochastic Trust Region Algorithm Based on Careful Step Normalization

An algorithm is proposed for solving stochastic and finite sum minimization problems. Based on a trust region methodology, the algorithm employs normalized steps, at least as long as the norms of the stochastic gradient estimates are within a specified interval. The complete algorithm—which dynamically chooses whether or not to employ normalized steps—is proved to have … Read more

SDDP.jl: a Julia package for Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming

In this paper we present SDDP.jl, an open-source library for solving multistage stochastic optimization problems using the Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming algorithm. SDDP.jl is built upon JuMP, an algebraic modelling language in Julia. This enables a high-level interface for the user, while simultaneously providing performance that is similar to implementations in low-level languages. We benchmark … Read more

An algorithm for binary chance-constrained problems using IIS

We propose an algorithm based on infeasible irreducible subsystems (IIS) to solve general binary chance-constrained problems. By leverag- ing on the problem structure we are able to generate good quality upper bounds to the optimal value early in the algorithm, and the discrete do- main is used to guide us eciently in the search of … Read more

Random Gradient Extrapolation for Distributed and Stochastic Optimization

In this paper, we consider a class of finite-sum convex optimization problems defined over a distributed multiagent network with $m$ agents connected to a central server. In particular, the objective function consists of the average of $m$ ($\ge 1$) smooth components associated with each network agent together with a strongly convex term. Our major contribution … Read more

Variational inequality formulation for the games with random payoffs

We consider an n-player non-cooperative game with random payoffs and continuous strategy set for each player. The random payoffs of each player are defined using a finite dimensional random vector. We formulate this problem as a chance-constrained game by defining the payoff function of each player using a chance constraint. We first consider the case … Read more

Optimization of Stochastic Problems with Probability Functions via Differential Evolution

Chance constrained programming, quantile/Value-at-Risk (VaR) optimization and integral quantile / Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) optimization problems as Stochastic Programming Problems with Probability Functions (SPP-PF) are one of the most widely studied optimization problems in recent years. As a rule real-life SPP-PF is nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problem with complex geometry of objective function. Moreover, often it cannot … Read more