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The Price of Robustness

Author

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  • Dimitris Bertsimas

    (Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, E53-363, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139)

  • Melvyn Sim

    (Operations Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Dimitris Bertsimas & Melvyn Sim, 2004. "The Price of Robustness," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 52(1), pages 35-53, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:oropre:v:52:y:2004:i:1:p:35-53
    DOI: 10.1287/opre.1030.0065
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. ,, 2000. "Problems And Solutions," Econometric Theory, Cambridge University Press, vol. 16(2), pages 287-299, April.
    2. A. L. Soyster, 1973. "Technical Note—Convex Programming with Set-Inclusive Constraints and Applications to Inexact Linear Programming," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 21(5), pages 1154-1157, October.
    3. A. Ben-Tal & A. Nemirovski, 1998. "Robust Convex Optimization," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 23(4), pages 769-805, November.
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