Pseudo-Valid Cutting Planes for Two-Stage Mixed-Integer Stochastic Programs with Right-Hand-Side Uncertainty

Abstract

Cutting planes need not be valid in stochastic integer optimization. Many practical problems under uncertainty, for example, in energy, logistics, and healthcare, can be modeled as mixed-integer stochastic programs (MISPs). However, such problems are notoriously difficult to solve. In “Pseudo-Valid Cutting Planes for Two-Stage Mixed-Integer Stochastic Programs with Right-Hand-Side Uncertainty,” Romeijnders and van der Laan introduce a novel approach to solve two-stage MISPs. Instead of using exact cuts that are always valid, they propose to use pseudo-valid cutting planes for the second-stage feasible regions that may cut away feasible integer second-stage solutions for some scenarios and may be overly conservative for others. The advantage of using such cutting planes is that the approximating problem remains convex in the first-stage decision variables and thus can be solved efficiently. Moreover, the performance of these cutting planes is good if the variability of the random parameters in the model is large enough.