A Successive Refinement for Solving Stochastic Programs with Decision-Dependent Random Capacities
Publication Year: 2024
Hugh Medal and Samuel Affar.
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We study a class of two-stage stochastic programs in which the second stage includes
a set of components with uncertain capacity, and the expression for the distribution function
of the uncertain capacity includes first-stage variables. Thus, this class of problems has the
characteristics of a stochastic program with decision-dependent uncertainty. A natural way to
formulate this class of problems is to enumerate the scenarios and express the probability of
each scenario as a product of the first-stage decision variables; unfortunately, this formulation
results in an intractable model with a large number of variable products with high-degree. After
identifying structural results related to upper and lower bounds and how to improve these bounds,
we present a successive refinement algorithm that successively and dynamically tightens these
bounds. Implementing the algorithm within a branch-and-cut method, we report the results of
computational experiments that indicate that the successive refinement algorithm significantly
outperforms a benchmark approach. Specifically, results show that the algorithm finds an optimal
solution before the refined state space become too large.