Applications and algorithms for two-stage robust linear optimization

Abstract

The research scope of this thesis is two-stage robust linear optimization. We are interested in investigating algorithms that can explore its structure and also on adding alternatives to mitigate conservatism inherent to a robust solution. We develop algorithms that incorporate these alternatives and are customized to work with rather medium or large scale instances of problems. By doing this we experiment a holistic approach to conservatism in robust linear optimization and bring together the most recent advances in areas such as datadriven robust optimization, distributionally robust optimization and adaptive robust optimization. We apply these algorithms in defined applications of the network design/loading problem, the scheduling problem, a min-max-min combinatorial problem and the airline fleet assignment problem. We show how the algorithms developed improve performance when compared to previous implementations