The impact of wind uncertainty on the strategic valuation of distributed electricity storage

The intermittent nature of wind energy generation has introduced a new degree of uncertainty to the tactical planning of energy systems. Short-term energy balancing decisions are no longer (fully) known, and it is this lack of knowledge that causes the need for strategic thinking. But despite this observation, strategic models are rarely set in an … Read more

A Counterexample to “Threshold Boolean form for joint probabilistic constraints with random technology matrix”

Recently, in the paper “Threshold Boolean form for joint probabilistic constraints with random technology matrix” (Math. Program. 147:391–427, 2014), Kogan and Lejeune proposed a set of mixed-integer programming formulations for probabilistically constrained stochastic programs having random constraint matrix and finite support distribution. We show that the proposed formulations do not in general correctly model such … Read more

A note on sample complexity of multistage stochastic programs

We derive a \emph{lower bound} for the \emph{sample complexity} of the Sample Average Approximation method for a certain class of multistage stochastic optimization problems. In previous works, \emph{upper bounds} for such problems were derived. We show that the dependence of the \emph{lower bound} with respect to the complexity parameters and the problem’s data are comparable … Read more

A NEW PARTIAL SAMPLE AVERAGE APPROXIMATION METHOD FOR CHANCE CONSTRAINED PROBLEM

In this paper, we present a new scheme of a sampling method to solve chance constrained programs. First of all, a modified sample average approximation, namely Partial Sample Average Approximation (PSAA) is presented. The main advantage of our approach is that the PSAA problem has only continuous variables whilst the standard sample average approximation (SAA) … Read more

Scenario-Tree Decomposition: Bounds for Multistage Stochastic Mixed-Integer Programs

Multistage stochastic mixed-integer programming is a powerful modeling paradigm appropriate for many problems involving a sequence of discrete decisions under uncertainty; however, they are difficult to solve without exploiting special structures. We present scenario-tree decomposition to establish bounds for unstructured multistage stochastic mixed-integer programs. Our method decomposes the scenario tree into a number of smaller … Read more

Multilevel Optimization Modeling for Risk-Averse Stochastic Programming

Coherent risk measures have become a popular tool for incorporating risk aversion into stochastic optimization models. For dynamic models in which uncertainty is resolved at more than one stage, however, using coherent risk measures within a standard single-level optimization framework becomes problematic. To avoid severe time-consistency difficulties, the current state of the art is to … Read more

A scalable bounding method for multi-stage stochastic integer programs

Many dynamic decision problems involving uncertainty can be appropriately modeled as multi-stage stochastic programs. However, most practical instances are so large and/or complex that it is impossible to solve them on a single computer, especially due to memory limitations. Extending the work of Sandikci et al. (2013) on two-stage stochastic mixed-integer-programs (SMIPs), this paper develops … Read more

Fast Approximations for Online Scheduling of Outpatient Procedure Centers

This paper presents a new model for online decision making. Motivated by the health care delivery application of dynamically allocating patients to procedure rooms in outpatient procedure centers, the online stochastic extensible bin packing problem is described. The objective is to minimize the combined costs of opening procedure rooms and utilizing overtime to complete a … Read more

Improving the integer L-shaped method

We consider the integer L-shaped method for two-stage stochastic integer programs. To improve the performance of the algorithm, we present and combine two strategies. First, to avoid time-consuming exact evaluations of the second-stage cost function, we propose a simple modification that alternates between linear and mixed-integer subproblems. Then, to better approximate the shape of the … Read more

Applying oracles of on-demand accuracy in two-stage stochastic programming – a computational study

Traditionally, two variants of the L-shaped method based on Benders’ decomposition principle are used to solve two-stage stochastic programming problems: the single-cut and the multi-cut version. The concept of an oracle with on-demand accuracy was originally proposed in the context of bundle methods for unconstrained convex optimzation to provide approximate function data and subgradients. In … Read more