Zhi Chen Department of Management Sciences, College of Business, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong. zhi.chen@cityu.edu.hk

Melvyn Sim Department of Analytics & Operations, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore, 119077, Singapore. dscsimm@nus.edu.sg

Peng Xiong Department of Analytics & Operations, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore, 119077, Singapore. bizxio@nus.edu.sg

This research is supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its 2019 Academic Research Fund Tier 3 grant call (Award ref: MOE-2019-T3-1-010)
ABSTRACT

We present a new distributionally robust optimization model called robust stochastic optimization (RSO), which unifies both scenario-tree based stochastic linear optimization and distributionally robust optimization in a practicable framework that can be solved using the state-of-the-art commercial optimization solvers. We also develop a new algebraic modeling package, RSOME to facilitate the implementation of RSO models. The model of uncertainty incorporates both discrete and continuous random variables, typically assumed in scenario-tree based stochastic linear optimization and distributionally robust optimization respectively. To address the non-anticipativity of recourse decisions, we introduce the event-wise recourse adaptations, which integrate the scenario-tree adaptation originating from stochastic linear optimization and the affine adaptation popularized in distributionally robust optimization. Our proposed event-wise ambiguity set is rich enough to capture traditional statistic-based ambiguity sets with convex generalized moments, mixture distribution, φ-divergence, Wasserstein (Kantorovich-Rubinstein) metric, and also inspire machine-learning-based ones using techniques such as K-means clustering, and classification and regression trees. Several interesting RSO models, including optimizing over the Hurwicz criterion and two-stage problems over Wasserstein ambiguity sets, are provided.