Dynamic decision-making under uncertainty has a long and distinguished history in operations research. Due to the curse of dimensionality, solution schemes that naively partition or discretize the support of the random problem parameters are limited to small and medium-sized problems, or they require restrictive modeling assumptions (e.g., absence of recourse actions). In the last few … Read more
In this paper we consider robust models of surge capacity plans to be deployed in the event of a flu pandemic. In particular, we focus on managing critical staff levels at organizations that must remain operational during such an event. We develop efficient procedures for managing emergency resources so as to minimize the impact of … Read more
We investigate the sensitivity of the Colley Matrix (CM) rankings—one of six computer rankings used by the Bowl Championship Series—to (hypothetical) changes in the outcomes of (actual) games. Specifically, we measure the shift in the rankings of the top 25 teams when the win-loss outcome of, say, a single game between two teams, each with … Read more
Traffic in communication networks fluctuates heavily over time. Thus, to avoid capacity bottlenecks, operators highly overestimate the traffic volume during network planning. In this paper we consider telecommunication network design under traffic uncertainty, adapting the robust optimization approach of Bertsimas and Sim (2004). We present three different mathematical formulations for this problem, provide valid inequalities, … Read more
In this paper we focus on robust linear optimization problems with uncertainty regions defined by phi-divergences (for example, chi-squared, Hellinger, Kullback-Leibler). We show how uncertainty regions based on phi-divergences arise in a natural way as confidence sets if the uncertain parameters contain elements of a probability vector. Such problems frequently occur in, for example, optimization … Read more
We show that the robust counterpart of a convex quadratic constraint with ellipsoidal implementation error is equivalent to a system of conic quadratic constraints. To prove this result we first derive a sharper result for the S-lemma in case the two matrices involved can be simultaneously diagonalized. This extension of the S-lemma may also be … Read more
We consider an uncertain variant of the knapsack problem that arises when the exact weight of each item is not exactly known in advance but belongs to a given interval, and the number of items whose weight differs from the nominal value is bounded by a constant. We analyze the worsening of the optimal solution … Read more
Following a polynomial approach, many robust fixed-order controller design problems can be formulated as optimization problems whose set of feasible solutions is modelled by parametrized polynomial matrix inequalities (PMI). These feasibility sets are typically nonconvex. Given a parametrized PMI set, we provide a hierarchy of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems whose optimal solutions generate inner … Read more
An optimal planning of future wireless networks is fundamental to satisfy rising traffic demands jointly with the utilization of sophisticated techniques, such as OFDMA. Current methods for this task require a static model of the problem. However, uncertainty of data arises frequently in wireless networks, e. g., fluctuat- ing bit rate requirements. In this paper, … Read more
We present different robust frameworks using probabilistic ambiguity descriptions of the input data in the least squares problems. The three probability ambiguity descriptions are given by: (1) confidence interval over the first two moments; (2) bounds on the probability measure with moments constraints; (3) confidence interval over the probability measure by using the Kantorovich probability … Read more