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Robustness and Preferences in Combinatorial Optimization

In this thesis, we study robust combinatorial problems with interval data. We introduce several new measures of robustness in response to the drawbacks of existing measures of robustness. The idea of these new measures is to ensure that the solutions are satisfactory for the decision maker in all scenarios, including the worst case scenario. Therefore, we have introduced a threshold over the worst case costs, in which above this threshold, solutions are no longer satisfactory for the decision maker. It is, however, important to consider other criteria than just the worst case.
Therefore, in each of these new measures, a second criteria is used to evaluate the performance of the solution in other scenarios such as the best case one.
We also study the robust deviation p-elements problem. In fact, we study when this solution is equal to the optimal solution in the scenario where the cost of each element is the midpoint of its corresponding interval.
Then, we finally formulate the robust combinatorial problem with interval data as a bicriteria problem. We also integrate the decision maker's preferences over certain types of solutions into the model. We propose a method that uses these preferences to find the set of solutions that are never preferred by any other solution. We call this set the final set.
We study the properties of the final sets from a coherence point of view and from a robust point of view. From a coherence point of view, we study necessary and sufficient conditions for the final set to be monotonic, for the corresponding preferences to be without cycles, and for the set to be stable.
Those that do not satisfy these properties are eliminated since we believe these properties to be essential. We also study other properties such as the transitivity of the preference and indifference relations and more. We note that many of our final sets are included in one another and some are even intersections of other final sets. From a robust point of view, we compare our final sets with different measures of robustness and with the first- and second-degree stochastic dominance. We show which sets contain all of these solutions and which only contain these types of solutions. Therefore, when the decision maker chooses his preferences to find the final set, he knows what types of solutions may or may not be in the set.
Lastly, we implement this method and apply it to the Robust Shortest Path Problem. We look at how this method performs using different types of randomly generated instances.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BICfB/oai:ulb.ac.be:ETDULB:ULBetd-04182007-210743
Date15 December 2005
CreatorsHites, Romina
ContributorsPirlot, Marc, Labbe, Martine, Vanderpooten, Daniel, Vincke, Philippe, Mareschal, Bertrand
PublisherUniversite Libre de Bruxelles
Source SetsBibliothèque interuniversitaire de la Communauté française de Belgique
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://theses.ulb.ac.be/ETD-db/collection/available/ULBetd-04182007-210743/
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