Title
The Price of Robustness
Abstract
A robust approach to solving linear optimization problems with uncertain data was proposed in the early 1970s and has recently been extensively studied and extended. Under this approach, we are willing to accept a suboptimal solution for the nominal values of the data in order to ensure that the solution remains feasible and near optimal when the data changes. A concern with such an approach is that it might be too conservative. In this paper, we propose an approach that attempts to make this trade-off more attractive; that is, we investigate ways to decrease what we call the price of robustness. In particular, we flexibly adjust the level of conservatism of the robust solutions in terms of probabilistic bounds of constraint violations. An attractive aspect of our method is that the new robust formulation is also a linear optimization problem. Thus we naturally extend our methods to discrete optimization problems in a tractable way. We report numerical results for a portfolio optimization problem, a knapsack problem, and a problem from the Net Lib library.
Year
DOI
Venue
2004
10.1287/opre.1030.0065
Operations Research
Keywords
Field
DocType
robust solution,data change,robust approach,uncertain data,knapsack problem,portfolio optimization problem,attractive aspect,linear optimization problem,new robust formulation,discrete optimization problem,portfolio optimization,financial services,discrete optimization,linear optimization,programming
Mathematical optimization,Probabilistic-based design optimization,Robust optimization,Combinatorial optimization,Continuous knapsack problem,Cutting stock problem,Knapsack problem,Stochastic programming,Optimization problem,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
52
1
0030-364X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
514
35.48
4
Authors
2
Search Limit
100514
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dimitris J. Bertsimas14513365.31
Melvyn Sim21909117.68