Inverse Stochastic Linear Programming

Inverse optimization perturbs objective function to make an initial feasible solution optimal with respect to perturbed objective function while minimizing cost of perturbation. We extend inverse optimization to two-stage stochastic linear programs. Since the resulting model grows with number of scenarios, we present two decomposition approaches for solving these problems. Citation Unpublished: 07-1, University of … Read more

Extending Algebraic Modelling Languages for Stochastic Programming

Algebraic modelling languages have gained wide acceptance and use in Mathematical Programming by researchers and practitioners. At a basic level, stochastic programming models can be defined using these languages by constructing their deterministic equivalent. Unfortunately, this leads to very large model data instances. We propose a direct approach in which the random values of the … Read more

StAMPL: A Filtration-Oriented Modeling Tool for Stochastic Programming

Every multistage stochastic programming problem with recourse (MSPR) contains a filtration process. In this research, we created a notation that makes the filtration process the central syntactic construction of the MSPR. As a result, we achieve lower redundancy and higher modularity than is possible with the mathematical notation commonly associated with stochastic programming. To experiment … Read more

SPECTRAL STOCHASTIC FINITE-ELEMENT METHODS FOR PARAMETRIC CONSTRAINED OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS

We present a method to approximate the solution mapping of parametric constrained optimization problems. The approximation, which is of the spectral stochastic finite element type, is represented as a linear combination of orthogonal polynomials. Its coefficients are determined by solving an appropriate finite-dimensional constrained optimization problem. We show that, under certain conditions, the latter problem … Read more

What Multistage Stochastic Programming Can Do for Network Revenue Management

Airlines must dynamically choose how to allocate their flight capacity to incoming travel demand. Because some passengers take connecting flights, the decisions for all network flights must be made simultaneously. To simplify the decision making process, most practitioners assume demand is deterministic and equal to average demand. We propose a multistage stochastic programming approach that … Read more

On Safe Tractable Approximations of Chance Constrained Linear Matrix Inequalities

In the paper, we consider the chance constrained version $$ \Prob\{A_0[x]+\sum_{i=1}^d\zeta_i A_i[x]\succeq0\}\geq1-\epsilon, $$ of an affinely perturbed Linear Matrix Inequality constraint; here $A_i[x]$ are symmetric matrices affinely depending on the decision vector $x$, and $\zeta_1,…,\zeta_d$ are independent of each other random perturbations with light tail distributions (e.g., bounded or Gaussian). Constraints of this type, playing … Read more

Asymptotics of minimax stochastic programs

We discuss in this paper asymptotics of the sample average approximation (SAA) of the optimal value of a minimax stochastic programming problem. The main tool of our analysis is a specific version of the infinite dimensional Delta Method. As an example, we discuss asymptotics of SAA of risk averse stochastic programs involving the absolute semideviation … Read more

A Q-Learning Algorithm with Continuous State Space

We study in this paper a Markov Decision Problem (MDP) with continuous state space and discrete decision variables. We propose an extension of the Q-learning algorithm introduced to solve this problem by Watkins in 1989 for completely discrete MDPs. Our algorithm relies on stochastic approximation and functional estimation, and uses kernels to locally update the … Read more

Cutting planes for multi-stage stochastic integer programs

This paper addresses the problem of finding cutting planes for multi-stage stochastic integer programs. We give a general method for generating cutting planes for multi-stage stochastic integer programs based on combining inequalities that are valid for the individual scenarios. We apply the method to generate cuts for a stochastic version of a dynamic knapsack problem … Read more

Selected Topics in Robust Convex Optimization

Robust Optimization is a rapidly developing methodology for handling optimization problems affected by non-stochastic “uncertain-but-bounded” data perturbations. In this paper, we overview several selected topics in this popular area, specifically, (1) recent extensions of the basic concept of {\sl robust counterpart} of an optimization problem with uncertain data, (2) tractability of robust counterparts, (3) links … Read more