Adjustable robust strategies for flood protection

Flood protection is of major importance to many flood-prone regions and involves substantial investment and maintenance costs. Modern flood risk management requires often to determine a cost-efficient protection strategy, i.e., one with lowest possible long run cost and satisfying flood protection standards imposed by the regulator throughout the entire planning horizon. There are two challenges … Read more

Maximizing a class of utility functions over the vertices of a polytope

Given a polytope X, a monotone concave univariate function g, and two vectors c and d, we study the discrete optimization problem of finding a vertex of X that maximizes the utility function c’x + g(d’x). This problem has numerous applications in combinatorial optimization with a probabilistic objective, including estimation of project duration with stochastic … Read more

A Copositive Approach for Two-Stage Adjustable Robust Optimization with Uncertain Right-Hand Sides

We study two-stage adjustable robust linear programming in which the right-hand sides are uncertain and belong to a convex, compact uncertainty set. This problem is NP-hard, and the affine policy is a popular, tractable approximation. We prove that under standard and simple conditions, the two-stage problem can be reformulated as a copositive optimization problem, which … Read more

Conic Programming Reformulations of Two-Stage Distributionally Robust Linear Programs over Wasserstein Balls

Adaptive robust optimization problems are usually solved approximately by restricting the adaptive decisions to simple parametric decision rules. However, the corresponding approximation error can be substantial. In this paper we show that two-stage robust and distributionally robust linear programs can often be reformulated exactly as conic programs that scale polynomially with the problem dimensions. Specifically, … Read more

Improved Handling of Uncertainty and Robustness in Set Covering Problems

This paper studies the emergency service facility location problem in an uncertain environment. The main focus is the integration of uncertainty regarding the covered area due to uncertain traveling times. Previous approaches only consider either probabilistic or fuzzy optimization to cope with uncertainty. However, in many real-world problems the required statistical parameters are not precisely … Read more

A Tractable Approach for designing Piecewise Affine Policies in Two-stage Adjustable Robust Optimization

We consider the problem of designing piecewise affine policies for two-stage adjustable robust linear optimization problems under right-hand side uncertainty. It is well known that a piecewise affine policy is optimal although the number of pieces can be exponentially large. A significant challenge in designing a practical piecewise affine policy is constructing good pieces of … Read more

Online First-Order Framework for Robust Convex Optimization

Robust optimization (RO) has emerged as one of the leading paradigms to efficiently model parameter uncertainty. The recent connections between RO and problems in statistics and machine learning domains demand for solving RO problems in ever more larger scale. However, the traditional approaches for solving RO formulations based on building and solving robust counterparts or … Read more

Multi-Period Portfolio Optimization: Translation of Autocorrelation Risk to Excess Variance

Growth-optimal portfolios are guaranteed to accumulate higher wealth than any other investment strategy in the long run. However, they tend to be risky in the short term. For serially uncorrelated markets, similar portfolios with more robust guarantees have been recently proposed. This paper extends these robust portfolios by accommodating non-zero autocorrelations that may reflect investors’ … Read more

Scalable Robust and Adaptive Inventory Routing

We consider the finite horizon inventory routing problem with uncertain demand, where a supplier must deliver a particular commodity to its customers periodically, such that even under uncertain demand the customers do not stock out, e.g. supplying residential heating oil to customers. Current techniques that solve this problem with stochastic demand, robust or adaptive optimization … Read more

A stochastic program with tractable time series and affine decision rules for the reservoir management problem

This paper proposes a multi-stage stochastic programming formulation for the reservoir management problem. Our problem specifically consists in minimizing the risk of floods over a fixed time horizon for a multi-dimensional hydro-electrical complex. We consider well-studied linear time series model and enhance the approach to consider heteroscedasticity. Using these stochastic processes under very general distributional … Read more