Computational Complexity Of Stochastic Programming Problems

Consisting of two parts, this book presents papers describing publicly available stochastic programming systems that are operational. It presents a diverse collection of application papers in areas such as production, supply chain and scheduling, gaming, environmental and pollution control, financial modeling, telecommunications, and electricity.

Optimization problems involving stochastic models occur in almost all areas of science and engineering, such as telecommunications, medicine, and finance. Their existence compels a need for rigorous ways of formulating, analyzing, and solving such problems. This book focuses on optimization problems involving uncertain parameters and covers the theoretical foundations and recent advances in areas where stochastic models are available. Readers will find coverage of the basic concepts of modeling these problems, including recourse actions and the nonanticipativity principle. The book also includes the theory of two-stage and multistage stochastic programming problems; the current state of the theory on chance (probabilistic) constraints, including the structure of the problems, optimality theory, and duality; and statistical inference in and risk-averse approaches to stochastic programming.

The search for the best possible performance is inherent in human nature. Individuals, enterprises and governments all seek optimal—that is, the best—possible solutions of problems that they meet. Evidently, continuous optimization plays an increasingly significant role in everyday management and technical decisions in science, engineering and commerce. The collection of 16 refereed papers in this book covers a diverse number of topics and provides a good picture of recent research in continuous optimization. The first part of the book presents substantive survey articles in a number of important topic areas of continuous optimization. Most of the papers in the second part present results on the theoretical aspects as well as numerical methods of continuous optimization. The papers in the third part are mainly concerned with applications of continuous optimization. Hence, the book will be an additional valuable source of information to faculty, students, and researchers who use continuous optimization to model and solve problems. Audience This book is intended for researchers in mathematical programming, optimization and operations research; engineers in various fields; and graduate students in applied mathematics, engineering and operations research.

The aim of stochastic programming is to find optimal decisions in problems which involve uncertain data. This field is currently developing rapidly with contributions from many disciplines including operations research, mathematics, and probability. At the same time, it is now being applied in a wide variety of subjects ranging from agriculture to financial planning and from industrial engineering to computer networks. This textbook provides a first course in stochastic programming suitable for students with a basic knowledge of linear programming, elementary analysis, and probability. The authors aim to present a broad overview of the main themes and methods of the subject. Its prime goal is to help students develop an intuition on how to model uncertainty into mathematical problems, what uncertainty changes bring to the decision process, and what techniques help to manage uncertainty in solving the problems. In this extensively updated new edition there is more material on methods and examples including several new approaches for discrete variables, new results on risk measures in modeling and Monte Carlo sampling methods, a new chapter on relationships to other methods including approximate dynamic programming, robust optimization and online methods. The book is highly illustrated with chapter summaries and many examples and exercises. Students, researchers and practitioners in operations research and the optimization area will find it particularly of interest. Review of First Edition: "The discussion on modeling issues, the large number of examples used to illustrate the material, and the breadth of the coverage make 'Introduction to Stochastic Programming' an ideal textbook for the area." (Interfaces, 1998)

Optimization problems involving stochastic models occur in almost all areas of science and engineering, such as telecommunications, medicine, and finance. Their existence compels a need for rigorous ways of formulating, analyzing, and solving such problems. This book focuses on optimization problems involving uncertain parameters and covers the theoretical foundations and recent advances in areas where stochastic models are available.? In?Lectures on Stochastic Programming: Modeling and Theory, Second Edition, the authors introduce new material to reflect recent developments in stochastic programming, including: an analytical description of the tangent and normal cones of chance constrained sets; analysis of optimality conditions applied to nonconvex problems; a discussion of the stochastic dual dynamic programming method; an extended discussion of law invariant coherent risk measures and their Kusuoka representations; and in-depth analysis of dynamic risk measures and concepts of time consistency, including several new results.?

Optimization problems involving sequential decisions in a stochastic environment were studied in Stochastic Programming (SP), Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) and Markov Decision Processes (MDP). This monograph concentrates on SP and SOC modeling approaches. In these frameworks, there are natural situations when the considered problems are convex. The classical approach to sequential optimization is based on dynamic programming. It has the problem of the so-called "curse of dimensionality", in that its computational complexity increases exponentially with respect to the dimension of state variables. Recent progress in solving convex multistage stochastic problems is based on cutting plane approximations of the cost-to-go (value) functions of dynamic programming equations. Cutting plane type algorithms in dynamical settings is one of the main topics of this monograph. Also discussed in this work are stochastic approximation type methods applied to multistage stochastic optimization problems. From the computational complexity point of view, these two types of methods seem to be complimentary to each other. Cutting plane type methods can handle multistage problems with a large number of stages but a relatively smaller number of state (decision) variables. On the other hand, stochastic approximation type methods can only deal with a small number of stages but a large number of decision variables.

This book is devoted to the problems of stochastic (or probabilistic) programming. The author took as his basis the specialized lectures which he delivered to the graduates from the economic cybernetics department of Leningrad University beginning in 1967. Since 1971 the author has delivered a specialized course on Stochastic Programming to the gradu ates from the faculty of applied mathematics/management processes at Leningrad University. The present monograph consists of seven chapters. In Chapter I, which is of an introductory character, consideration is given to the problems of uncertainty and probability, used for modelling complicated systems. Fundamental indications for the classification of stochastic pro gramming problems are given. Chapter II is devoted to the analysis of various models of chance-constrained stochastic programming problems. Examples of technological and applied economic problems of management with chance-constraints are given. In Chapter III two-stage stochastic programming problems are investigated, various models are given, and these models are qualitatively analyzed. In the conclusion of the chapter consideration is given to: the transport problem with random data, the problem of the determination of production volume, and the problem of planning the flights of aircraft as two-stage stochastic programming problems. Multi-stage stochastic programming problems are investigated in Chapter IV. The dependencies between prior and posterior decision rules and decision distributions are given. Dual problems are investigated.