Models for Minimax Stochastic Linear Optimization Problems with Risk Aversion

We propose a semidefinite optimization (SDP) model for the class of minimax two-stage stochastic linear optimization problems with risk aversion. The distribution of second-stage random variables belongs to a set of multivariate distributions with known first and second moments. For the minimax stoc...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Doan, Xuan Vinh, Natarajan, Karthik, Teo, Chung-Piaw, Bertsimas, Dimitris J
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/69922
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1985-1003
Description
Summary:We propose a semidefinite optimization (SDP) model for the class of minimax two-stage stochastic linear optimization problems with risk aversion. The distribution of second-stage random variables belongs to a set of multivariate distributions with known first and second moments. For the minimax stochastic problem with random objective, we provide a tight SDP formulation. The problem with random right-hand side is NP-hard in general. In a special case, the problem can be solved in polynomial time. Explicit constructions of the worst-case distributions are provided. Applications in a production-transportation problem and a single facility minimax distance problem are provided to demonstrate our approach. In our experiments, the performance of minimax solutions is close to that of data-driven solutions under the multivariate normal distribution and better under extremal distributions. The minimax solutions thus guarantee to hedge against these worst possible distributions and provide a natural distribution to stress test stochastic optimization problems under distributional ambiguity.