This book deals with decision making in environments of significant data un certainty, with particular emphasis on operations and production management applications. For such environments, we suggest the use of the robustness ap proach to decision making, which assumes inadequate knowledge of the decision maker about the random state of nature and develops a decision that hedges against the worst contingency that may arise. The main motivating factors for a decision maker to use the robustness approach are: • It does not ignore uncertainty and takes a proactive step in response to the fact that forecasted values of uncertain parameters will not occur in most environments; • It applies to decisions of unique, non-repetitive nature, which are common in many fast and dynamically changing environments; • It accounts for the risk averse nature of decision makers; and • It recognizes that even though decision environments are fraught with data uncertainties, decisions are evaluated ex post with the realized data. For all of the above reasons, robust decisions are dear to the heart of opera tional decision makers. This book takes a giant first step in presenting decision support tools and solution methods for generating robust decisions in a variety of interesting application environments. Robust Discrete Optimization is a comprehensive mathematical programming framework for robust decision making.

Robust optimization is still a relatively new approach to optimization problems affected by uncertainty, but it has already proved so useful in real applications that it is difficult to tackle such problems today without considering this powerful methodology. Written by the principal developers of robust optimization, and describing the main achievements of a decade of research, this is the first book to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the subject. Robust optimization is designed to meet some major challenges associated with uncertainty-affected optimization problems: to operate under lack of full information on the nature of uncertainty; to model the problem in a form that can be solved efficiently; and to provide guarantees about the performance of the solution. The book starts with a relatively simple treatment of uncertain linear programming, proceeding with a deep analysis of the interconnections between the construction of appropriate uncertainty sets and the classical chance constraints (probabilistic) approach. It then develops the robust optimization theory for uncertain conic quadratic and semidefinite optimization problems and dynamic (multistage) problems. The theory is supported by numerous examples and computational illustrations. An essential book for anyone working on optimization and decision making under uncertainty, Robust Optimization also makes an ideal graduate textbook on the subject.

This book provides a broad coverage of the recent advances in robustness analysis in decision aiding, optimization, and analytics. It offers a comprehensive illustration of the challenges that robustness raises in different operations research and management science (OR/MS) contexts and the methodologies proposed from multiple perspectives. Aside from covering recent methodological developments, this volume also features applications of robust techniques in engineering and management, thus illustrating the robustness issues raised in real-world problems and their resolution within advances in OR/MS methodologies. Robustness analysis seeks to address issues by promoting solutions, which are acceptable under a wide set of hypotheses, assumptions and estimates. In OR/MS, robustness has been mostly viewed in the context of optimization under uncertainty. Several scholars, however, have emphasized the multiple facets of robustness analysis in a broader OR/MS perspective that goes beyond the traditional framework, seeking to cover the decision support nature of OR/MS methodologies as well. As new challenges emerge in a “big-data'” era, where the information volume, speed of flow, and complexity increase rapidly, and analytics play a fundamental role for strategic and operational decision-making at a global level, robustness issues such as the ones covered in this book become more relevant than ever for providing sound decision support through more powerful analytic tools.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications, COCOA 2013, held in Chengdu, China, in December 2013. The 36 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 submissions. The papers feature original research in the areas of combinatorial optimization and its applications. In addition to theoretical results there are reports on experimental and applied research of general algorithmic interest.

This book presents the mathematical theory of vector variational inequalities and their relations with vector optimization problems. It is the first-ever book to introduce well-posedness and sensitivity analysis for vector equilibrium problems. The first chapter provides basic notations and results from the areas of convex analysis, functional analysis, set-valued analysis and fixed-point theory for set-valued maps, as well as a brief introduction to variational inequalities and equilibrium problems. Chapter 2 presents an overview of analysis over cones, including continuity and convexity of vector-valued functions. The book then shifts its focus to solution concepts and classical methods in vector optimization. It describes the formulation of vector variational inequalities and their applications to vector optimization, followed by separate chapters on linear scalarization, nonsmooth and generalized vector variational inequalities. Lastly, the book introduces readers to vector equilibrium problems and generalized vector equilibrium problems. Written in an illustrative and reader-friendly way, the book offers a valuable resource for all researchers whose work involves optimization and vector optimization.

Running to almost 400 pages, and featuring more than 40 papers, this work on combinatorial optimization and applications will be seen as an important addition to the literature. It constitutes the refereed proceedings of the first International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications, COCOA 2007, held in Xi'an, China in August of that year. The 29 revised full papers presented together with 8 invited papers and 2 invited presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from 114 submissions and cover both theoretical issues and practical applications.

Operations research often solves deterministic optimization problems based on elegantand conciserepresentationswhereall parametersarepreciselyknown. In the face of uncertainty, probability theory is the traditional tool to be appealed for, and stochastic optimization is actually a signi?cant sub-area in operations research. However, the systematic use of prescribed probability distributions so as to cope with imperfect data is partially unsatisfactory. First, going from a deterministic to a stochastic formulation, a problem may becomeintractable. Agoodexampleiswhengoingfromdeterministictostoch- tic scheduling problems like PERT. From the inception of the PERT method in the 1950’s, it was acknowledged that data concerning activity duration times is generally not perfectly known and the study of stochastic PERT was launched quite early. Even if the power of today’s computers enables the stochastic PERT to be addressed to a large extent, still its solutions often require simplifying assumptions of some kind. Another di?culty is that stochastic optimization problems produce solutions in the average. For instance, the criterion to be maximized is more often than not expected utility. This is not always a meaningful strategy. In the case when the underlying process is not repeated a lot of times, let alone being one-shot, it is not clear if this criterion is realistic, in particular if probability distributions are subjective. Expected utility was proposed as a rational criterion from ?rst principles by Savage. In his view, the subjective probability distribution was - sically an artefact useful to implement a certain ordering of solutions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization, IPCO 2004, held in New York City, USA in June 2004. The 32 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 109 submissions. Among the topics addressed are vehicle routing, network management, mixed-integer programming, computational complexity, game theory, supply chain management, stochastic optimization problems, production scheduling, graph computations, computational graph theory, separation algorithms, local search, linear optimization, integer programming, graph coloring, packing, combinatorial optimization, routing, flow algorithms, 0/1 polytopes, and polyhedra.

Nature-inspired algorithms have a great popularity in the current scientific community, being the focused scope of many research contributions in the literature year by year. The rationale behind the acquired momentum by this broad family of methods lies on their outstanding performance evinced in hundreds of research fields and problem instances. This book gravitates on the development of nature-inspired methods and their application to stochastic, dynamic and robust optimization. Topics covered by this book include the design and development of evolutionary algorithms, bio-inspired metaheuristics, or memetic methods, with empirical, innovative findings when used in different subfields of mathematical optimization, such as stochastic, dynamic, multimodal and robust optimization, as well as noisy optimization and dynamic and constraint satisfaction problems.