A hierarchy of policies for adaptive optimization

In this paper, we propose a new tractable framework for dealing with linear dynamical systems affected by uncertainty, applicable to multistage robust optimization and stochastic programming. We introduce a hierarchy of near-optimal polynomial disturbance-feedback control policies, and show how thes...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Iancu, Dan Andrei, Parrilo, Pablo A., Bertsimas, Dimitris J
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/74604
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1985-1003
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1132-8477
Description
Summary:In this paper, we propose a new tractable framework for dealing with linear dynamical systems affected by uncertainty, applicable to multistage robust optimization and stochastic programming. We introduce a hierarchy of near-optimal polynomial disturbance-feedback control policies, and show how these can be computed by solving a single semidefinite programming problem. The approach yields a hierarchy parameterized by a single variable (the degree of the polynomial policies), which controls the trade-off between the optimality gap and the computational requirements. We evaluate our framework in the context of three classical applications-two in inventory management, and one in robust regulation of an active suspension system-in which very strong numerical performance is exhibited, at relatively modest computational expense.