Robust Regression over Averaged Uncertainty

We propose a new formulation of robust regression by integrating all realizations of the uncertainty set and taking an averaged approach to obtain the optimal solution for the ordinary least-squared regression problem. We show that this formulation surprisingly recovers ridge regression and establishes the missing link between robust optimization and the mean squared error approaches … Read more

Robust Continuous-Time Service Network Design under Travel Time Uncertainty

The continuous-time service network design problem (CTSNDP) has wide applications in the field of transportation, but it is complicated by travel time uncertainty resulting from unpredictable traffic conditions. Incorporating uncertain travel times poses a significant challenge, as time-indexed mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulations commonly used to solve the CTSNDP with deterministic travel times become impractical. … Read more

The Robust Bike Sharing Rebalancing Problem: Formulations and a Branch-and-Cut Algorithm

Bike Sharing Systems (BSSs) offer a sustainable and efficient urban transportation solution, bringing flexible and eco-friendly alternatives to city logistics. During their operation, BSSs may suffer from unbalanced bike distribution among stations, requiring rebalancing operations throughout the system. The inherent uncertain demand at the stations further complicates these rebalancing operations, even when performed during downtime. … Read more

Learning Optimal Classification Trees Robust to Distribution Shifts

We consider the problem of learning classification trees that are robust to distribution shifts between training and testing/deployment data. This problem arises frequently in high stakes settings such as public health and social work where data is often collected using self-reported surveys which are highly sensitive to e.g., the framing of the questions, the time … Read more

Robust Optimization Under Controllable Uncertainty

Applications for optimization with uncertain data in practice often feature a possibility to reduce the uncertainty at a given query cost, e.g., by conducting measurements, surveys, or paying a third party in advance to limit the deviations. To model this type of applications we introduce the concept of optimization problems under controllable uncertainty (OCU). For … Read more

Delay-Resistant Robust Vehicle Routing with Heterogeneous Time Windows

We consider a robust variant of the vehicle routing problem with heterogeneous time windows (RVRP-HTW) with a focus on delay-resistant solutions. Here, customers have different availability time windows for every vehicle and must be provided with a preferably tight appointment window for the planned service. Different vehicles are a possibility to model different days on … Read more

Recycling Valid Inequalities for Robust Combinatorial Optimization with Budget Uncertainty

Robust combinatorial optimization with budget uncertainty is one of the most popular approaches for integrating uncertainty into optimization problems. The existence of a compact reformulation for (mixed-integer) linear programs and positive complexity results give the impression that these problems are relatively easy to solve. However, the practical performance of the reformulation is quite poor when … Read more

Connections and Reformulations between Robust and Bilevel Optimization

Robust and bilevel optimization share the common feature that they involve a certain multilevel structure. Hence, although they model something rather different when used in practice, they seem to have a similar mathematical structure. In this paper, we analyze the connections between different types of robust problems (strictly robust problems with and without decision-dependence of … Read more

Randomized Robust Price Optimization

The robust multi-product pricing problem is to determine the prices of a collection of products so as to maximize the worst-case revenue, where the worst case is taken over an uncertainty set of demand models that the firm expects could be realized in practice. A tacit assumption in this approach is that the pricing decision … Read more

From the uncertainty set to the solution and back: the two stage case

Robust optimization approaches compute solutions resilient to data uncertainty, represented by a given uncertainty set. Instead, the problem of computing the largest uncertainty set that a given solution can support was, so far, quite neglected and the only results refer to the single stage framework. For that setting, it was proved that this problem can … Read more