Refine
Year of publication
- 2016 (2) (remove)
Document Type
- Preprint (2)
Language
- English (2) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Faculty / Organisational entity
We present a new approach to handle uncertain combinatorial optimization problems that uses solution ranking procedures to determine the degree of robustness of a solution. Unlike classic concepts for robust optimization, our approach is not purely based on absolute quantitative performance, but also includes qualitative aspects that are of major importance for the decision maker.
We discuss the two variants, solution ranking and objective ranking robustness, in more detail, presenting problem complexities and solution approaches. Using an uncertain shortest path problem as a computational example, the potential of our approach is demonstrated in the context of evacuation planning due to river flooding.
We consider the problem to evacuate several regions due to river flooding, where sufficient time is given to plan ahead. To ensure a smooth evacuation procedure, our model includes the decision which regions to assign to which shelter, and when evacuation orders should be issued, such that roads do not become congested.
Due to uncertainty in weather forecast, several possible scenarios are simultaneously considered in a robust optimization framework. To solve the resulting integer program, we apply a Tabu search algorithm based on decomposing the problem into better tractable subproblems. Computational experiments on random instances and an instance based on Kulmbach, Germany, data show considerable improvement compared to an MIP solver provided with a strong starting solution.