Distributionally Robust Facility Location with Bimodal Random Demand

In this paper, we consider a decision-maker who wants to determine a subset of locations from a given set of candidate sites to open facilities and accordingly assign customer demand to these open facilities. Unlike classical facility location settings, we focus on a new setting where customer demand is bimodal, i.e., display, or belong to, … Read more

Finite-Sample Guarantees for Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Optimization: Breaking the Curse of Dimensionality

Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (DRO) aims to find robust and generalizable solutions by hedging against data perturbations in Wasserstein distance. Despite its recent empirical success in operations research and machine learning, existing performance guarantees for generic loss functions are either overly conservative due to the curse of dimensionality, or plausible only in large sample asymptotics. … Read more

Strong Formulations for Distributionally Robust Chance-Constrained Programs with Left-Hand Side Uncertainty under Wasserstein Ambiguity

Distributionally robust chance-constrained programs (DR-CCP) over Wasserstein ambiguity sets exhibit attractive out-of-sample performance and admit big-$M$-based mixed-integer programming (MIP) reformulations with conic constraints. However, the resulting formulations often suffer from scalability issues as sample size increases. To address this shortcoming, we derive stronger formulations that scale well with respect to the sample size. Our focus … Read more

Equivalent second-order cone programs for distributionally robust zero-sum games

We consider a two player zero-sum game with stochastic linear constraints. The probability distributions of the vectors associated with the constraints are partially known. The available information with respect to the distribution is based mainly on the two first moments. In this vein, we formulate the stochastic linear constraints as distributionally robust chance constraints. We … Read more

Building Load Control using Distributionally Robust Chance-Constrained Programs with Right-Hand Side Uncertainty and the Risk-Adjustable Variants

Aggregation of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) loads can provide reserves to absorb volatile renewable energy, especially solar photo-voltaic (PV) generation. However, the time-varying PV generation is not perfectly known when the system operator decides the HVAC control schedules. To consider the unknown uncertain PV generation, in this paper, we formulate a distributionally robust … Read more

Computationally Efficient Approximations for Distributionally Robust Optimization

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a modeling framework in decision making under uncertainty where the probability distribution of a random parameter is unknown while its partial information (e.g., statistical properties) is available. In this framework, the unknown probability distribution is assumed to lie in an ambiguity set consisting of all distributions that are compatible with … Read more

A Distributionally Robust Optimization Approach for Stochastic Elective Surgery Scheduling with Limited Intensive Care Unit Capacity

In this paper, we study the decision process of assigning elective surgery patients to available surgical blocks in multiple operating rooms (OR) under random surgery durations, random postoperative length-of-stay in the intensive care unit (ICU), and limited capacity of ICU. The probability distributions of random parameters are assumed to be ambiguous, and only the mean … Read more

On Linear Optimization over Wasserstein Balls

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

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

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

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