Robust Optimization of Sums of Piecewise Linear Functions with Application to Inventory Problems

Amir Ardestani-Jaafari () and Erick Delage ()
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Amir Ardestani-Jaafari: Department of Decision Sciences, HEC Montréal, Montreal, Quebec H3T 2A7, Canada
Erick Delage: Department of Decision Sciences, HEC Montréal, Montreal, Quebec H3T 2A7, Canada

Operations Research, 2016, vol. 64, issue 2, 474-494

Abstract: Robust optimization is a methodology that has gained a lot of attention in the recent years. This is mainly due to the simplicity of the modeling process and ease of resolution even for large scale models. Unfortunately, the second property is usually lost when the cost function that needs to be “robustified” is not concave (or linear) with respect to the perturbing parameters. In this paper we study robust optimization of sums of piecewise linear functions over polyhedral uncertainty set. Given that these problems are known to be intractable, we propose a new scheme for constructing conservative approximations based on the relaxation of an embedded mixed-integer linear program and relate this scheme to methods that are based on exploiting affine decision rules. Our new scheme gives rise to two tractable models that, respectively, take the shape of a linear program and a semidefinite program, with the latter having the potential to provide solutions of better quality than the former at the price of heavier computations. We present conditions under which our approximation models are exact. In particular, we are able to propose the first exact reformulations for a robust (and distributionally robust) multi-item newsvendor problem with budgeted uncertainty set and a reformulation for robust multiperiod inventory problems that is exact whether the uncertainty region reduces to a L 1 -norm ball or to a box. An extensive set of empirical results will illustrate the quality of the approximate solutions that are obtained using these two models on randomly generated instances of the latter problem.

Keywords: robust optimization; piecewise linear; linear programming relaxation; semidefinite program; tractable approximations; newsvendor problem; inventory problem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

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