In this paper, we consider a variant of adaptive robust combinatorial optimization problems where the decision maker can prepare K solutions and choose the best among them upon knowledge of the true data realizations. We suppose that the uncertainty may affect the objective and the constraints through functions that are not necessarily linear. We propose a new exact algorithm for solving these problems when the feasible set of the nominal optimization problem does not contain too many good solutions. Our algorithm enumerates these good solutions, generates dynamically a set of scenarios from the uncertainty set, and assigns the solutions to the generated scenarios using a vertex p-center formulation, solved by a binary search algorithm. Our numerical results on adaptive shortest path and knapsack with conflicts problems show that our algorithm compares favorably with the methods proposed in the literature. We additionally propose a heuristic extension of our method to handle problems where it is prohibitive to enumerate all good solutions. This heuristic is shown to provide good solutions within a reasonable solution time limit on the adaptive knapsack with conflicts problem. Finally, we illustrate how our approach handles nonlinear functions on an all-or-nothing subset problem taken from the literature. Summary of Contribution: Our paper describes a new exact algorithm for solving adaptive robust combinatorial optimization problems when the feasible set of the nominal optimization problems does not contain too many good solutions. Its development relies on a progressive relaxation of the problem augmented with a row-and-column generation technique. Its efficient execution requires a reformulation of this progressive relaxation, coupled with dominance rules and a binary search algorithm. The proposed algorithm is amenable to exploiting the special structures of the problems considered as illustrated with various applications throughout the paper. A practical view is provided by the proposition of a heuristic variant. Our computational experiments show that our proposed exact solution method outperforms the existing methodologies and therefore pushes the computational envelope for the class of problems considered.

We study last-mile delivery with the option of crowd shipping, where a company makes use of occasional drivers to complement its vehicle’s fleet in the activity of delivering products to its customers. We model it as a data-driven distributionally robust optimization approach to the capacitated vehicle routing problem. We assume the marginals of the defined uncertainty vector are known, but the joint distribution is difficult to estimate. The presence of customers and available occasional drivers can be random. We adopt a strategic planning perspective, where an optimal a priori solution is calculated before the uncertainty is revealed. Therefore, without the need for online resolution performance, we can experiment with exact solutions. Solving the problem defined above is challenging: not only the first-stage problem is already NP-Hard, but also the uncertainty and potentially the second-stage decisions are binary of high dimension, leading to non-convex optimization formulations that are complex to solve. We propose a branch-price-and-cut algorithm taking into consideration measures that exploit the intrinsic characteristics of our problem and reduce the complexity to solve it.

International audience

We experiment with an alternative routing scheme for the robust network loading problem with demand uncertainty. Named k‐adaptive, it is based on the fact that the decision‐maker chooses k second‐stage solutions and then commits to one of them only after realization of the uncertainty. This routing scheme, with its corresponding k‐partition of the uncertainty set, is dynamically defined under an iterative method to sequentially improve the solution. The method has an inherent characteristic of multiplying the number of variables and constraints after each iteration, so that additional measures are introduced in the solution strategy in order to control time performance. We compare our k‐adaptive results with the ones obtained through other routing schemes and also verify the effectiveness of the methods utilized using several realistic networks from SNDlib and other sources.