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 conĀ­ 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

Single-Commodity Robust Network Design with Finite and Hose Demand Sets

We study a single-commodity Robust Network Design problem (sRND) defined on an undirected graph. Our goal is to determine minimum cost capacities such that any traffic demand from a given uncertainty set can be satisfied by a feasible single-commodity flow. We consider two ways of representing the uncertainty set, either as a finite list of … Read more

Robust Binary Optimization using a Safe Tractable Approximation

We present a robust optimization approach to 0-1 linear programming with uncertain objective coefficients based on a safe tractable approximation of chance constraints, when only the first two moments and the support of the random parameters is known. We obtain nonlinear problems with only one additional (continuous) variable, for which we discuss solution techniques. The … Read more

The Value of Flexibility in Robust Location-Transportation Problems

This article studies a multi-period capacitated fixed-charge location-transportation problem in which, while the location and capacity of each facility need to be determined immediately, the determination of final production and distribution of products can be delayed until actual orders are received in each period. In contexts where little is known about future demand, robust optimization, … Read more

Multistage Robust Mixed Integer Optimization with Adaptive Partitions

We present a new partition-and-bound method for multistage adaptive mixed integer optimization (AMIO) problems that extends previous work on finite adaptability. The approach analyzes the optimal solution to a static (non-adaptive) version of an AMIO problem to gain insight into which regions of the uncertainty set are restricting the objective function value. We use this … Read more

Machine Learning and Portfolio Optimization

The portfolio optimization model has limited impact in practice due to estimation issues when applied with real data. To address this, we adapt two machine learning methods, regularization and cross-validation, for portfolio optimization. First, we introduce performance-based regularization (PBR), where the idea is to constrain the sample variances of the estimated portfolio risk and return, … Read more

Robust constrained shortest path problems under budgeted uncertainty

We study the robust constrained shortest path problem under resource uncertainty. After proving that the problem is \NPhard in the strong sense for arbitrary uncertainty sets, we focus on budgeted uncertainty sets introduced by Bertsimas and Sim (2003) and their extension to variable uncertainty by Poss (2013). We apply classical techniques to show that the … Read more

Multi-stage adjustable robust mixed-integer optimization via iterative splitting of the uncertainty set

In this paper we propose a methodology for constructing decision rules for integer and continuous decision variables in multiperiod robust linear optimization problems. This type of problems finds application in, for example, inventory management, lot sizing, and manpower management. We show that by iteratively splitting the uncertainty set into subsets one can differentiate the later-period … Read more