Robust capacity expansion of network flows

  • Authors:
  • Fernando Ordóñez;Jiamin Zhao

  • Affiliations:
  • Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Southern California, GER-240, Los Angeles, California 90089-0193;Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores, California 94065

  • Venue:
  • Networks
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We consider the problem of expanding arc capacities in a networksubject to demand and travel time uncertainty. We propose a robustoptimization approach to obtain capacity expansion solutions thatare insensitive to this uncertainty. Our results show that, underreasonable assumptions for network flow applications, such robustsolutions can be computed by solving tractable conic linearproblems. For example, the robust solution for a multicommodityflow problem is obtained by solving a linear program if the problemhas a single source and sink per commodity and the uncertainty indemand and travel time is given by independent bounded polyhedralsets. Preliminary computational results show that the robustsolution is attractive, as it can reduce the worst case cost bymore than 20%, while incurring a 5% loss in optimality whencompared to the optimal solution of a representative scenario.© 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 50(2), 1361452007