Data-Driven Patient Scheduling in Emergency Departments: A Hybrid Robust-Stochastic Approach

Emergency care necessitates adequate and timely treatment, which has unfortunately been compromised by crowding in many emergency departments (EDs). To address this issue, we study patient scheduling in EDs so that mandatory targets imposed on each patient’s door-to-provider time and length of stay can be collectively met with the largest probability. Exploiting patient flow data … Read more

Robust Optimal Control with Adjustable Uncertainty Sets

Robust control design for constrained uncertain systems is a well-studied topic. Given a known uncertainty set, the objective is to find a control policy that minimizes a given cost and satisfies the system’s constraints for all possible uncertainty realizations. In this paper, we extend the classical robust control setup by treating the uncertainty sets as … 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

Adaptive Elective Surgery Planning Under Duration and Length-Of-Stay Uncertainty: A Robust Optimization Approach

Scheduling elective surgeries is a complicated task due to the coupled effect of multiple sources of uncertainty and the impact of the proposed schedule on the downstream units. In this paper, we propose an adaptive robust optimization model to address the existing uncertainty in surgery duration and length-of-stay in the surgical intensive care unit. The … Read more

When are static and adjustable robust optimization with constraint-wise uncertainty equivalent?

Adjustable Robust Optimization (ARO) yields, in general, better worst-case solutions than static Robust Optimization (RO). However, ARO is computationally more difficult than RO. In this paper, we derive conditions under which the worst-case objective values of ARO and RO problems are equal. We prove that if the uncertainty is constraint-wise and the adjustable variables lie … Read more

Near-Optimal Ambiguity sets for Distributionally Robust Optimization

We propose a novel, Bayesian framework for assessing the relative strengths of data-driven ambiguity sets in distributionally robust optimization (DRO). The key idea is to measure the relative size between a candidate ambiguity set and an \emph{asymptotically optimal} set as the amount of data grows large. This asymptotically optimal set is provably the smallest convex … Read more

Robust optimization with ambiguous stochastic constraints under mean and dispersion information

In this paper we consider ambiguous stochastic constraints under partial information consisting of means and dispersion measures of the underlying random parameters. Whereas the past literature used the variance as the dispersion measure, here we use the mean absolute deviation from the mean (MAD). This makes it possible to use the old result of Ben-Tal … Read more

Robust optimization based EV charging

With the introduction of new technologies like electric vehicles and smart grids the operation and planning of power systems are subject to major changes. These technologies can bring various ftexibilities to different entities involved in decision making. This paper proposes a robust optimization based method to optimal charging/discharging of electric vehicles con­ sidering the electricity … Read more

Stochastic versus Robust Optimization for a Transportation Problem

In this paper we consider a transportation problem under uncertainty related to gypsum replenishment for a cement producer. The problem is to determine the number of vehicles to book at the beginning of each week to replenish gypsum at all the cement factories of the producer in order to minimize the total cost, given by … Read more

Minimizing Risk Exposure when the Choice of a Risk Measure is Ambiguous

Since the financial crisis of 2007-2009, there has been a renewed interest toward quantifying more appropriately the risks involved in financial positions. Popular risk measures such as variance and value-at-risk have been found inadequate as we now give more importance to properties such as monotonicity, convexity, translation invariance, scale invariance, and law invariance. Unfortunately, the … Read more