Branch and Price for Chance Constrained Bin Packing

This article considers two versions of the stochastic bin packing problem with chance constraints. In the first version, we formulate the problem as a two-stage stochastic integer program that considers item-to-bin allocation decisions in the context of chance constraints on total item size within the bins. Next, we describe a distributionally robust formulation of the … Read more

Scenario Decomposition for 0-1 Stochastic Programs: Improvements and Asynchronous Implementation

A recently proposed scenario decomposition algorithm for stochastic 0-1 programs finds an optimal solution by evaluating and removing individual solutions that are discovered by solving scenario subproblems. In this work, we develop an asynchronous, distributed implementation of the algorithm which has computational advantages over existing synchronous implementations of the algorithm. Improvements to both the synchronous … Read more

Ambiguous Joint Chance Constraints under Mean and Dispersion Information

We study joint chance constraints where the distribution of the uncertain parameters is only known to belong to an ambiguity set characterized by the mean and support of the uncertainties and by an upper bound on their dispersion. This setting gives rise to pessimistic (optimistic) ambiguous chance constraints, which require the corresponding classical chance constraints … Read more

A two-level SDDP Solving Strategy with Risk-Averse multivariate reservoir Storage Levels for Long Term power Generation Planning

Power generation planning in large-scale hydrothermal systems is a complex optimization task, specially due to the high uncertainty in the inflows to hydro plants. Since it is impossible to traverse the huge scenario tree of the multi-stage problem, stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) is the leading optimization technique to solve it, originally from an expected-cost … Read more

Revisiting some results on the sample complexity of multistage stochastic programs and some extensions

In this work we present explicit definitions for the sample complexity associated with the Sample Average Approximation (SAA) Method for instances and classes of multistage stochastic optimization problems. For such, we follow the same notion firstly considered in Kleywegt et al. (2001). We define the complexity for an arbitrary class of problems by considering its … Read more

A Stochastic Electricity Market Clearing Formulation with Consistent Pricing Properties

We argue that deterministic market clearing formulations introduce arbitrary distortions between day-ahead and expected real-time prices that bias economic incentives and block diversi cation. We extend and analyze the stochastic clearing formulation proposed by Pritchard et al. (2010) in which the social surplus function induces penalties between day-ahead and real-time quantities. We prove that the formulation … Read more

A robust optimization model for the risk averse reservoir management problem

This paper presents a new formulation for the risk averse stochastic reservoir management problem. Using recent advances in robust optimization and stochastic programming, we propose a dynamic, multi-objective model based on minimization of a multidimensional risk measure associated with floods and droughts for a hydro-electrical complex. We present our model and then identify approximate solutions … Read more

On Solving General Two-Stage Stochastic Programs

We study general two-stage stochastic programs and present conditions under which the second stage programs can be convexified. This allows us to relax the restrictions, such as integrality, binary, semi-continuity, and many others, on the second stage variables in certain situations. Next, we introduce two-stage stochastic disjunctive programs (TSS-DPs) and extend Balas’s linear programming equivalent … Read more

Robust Multicriteria Risk-Averse Stochastic Programming Models

In this paper, we study risk-averse models for multicriteria optimization problems under uncertainty. We use a weighted sum-based scalarization and take a robust approach by considering a set of scalarization vectors to address the ambiguity and inconsistency in the relative weights of each criterion. We model the risk aversion of the decision makers via the … Read more

Stochastically Constrained Simulation Optimization On Integer-Ordered Spaces: The cgR-SPLINE Algorithm

We consider the problem of identifying the solution(s) to an optimization problem whose domain is a subset of the integer lattice, and whose objective and constraint functions can only be observed using a stochastic simulation. Such problems seem particularly prevalent (see www.simopt.org) within service systems having capacity or service-level constraints. We present cgR-SPLINE — a … Read more