This rapidly developing field encompasses many disciplines including operations research, mathematics, and probability. Conversely, it is being applied in a wide variety of subjects ranging from agriculture to financial planning and from industrial engineering to computer networks. This textbook provides a first course in stochastic programming suitable for students with a basic knowledge of linear programming, elementary analysis, and probability. The authors present a broad overview of the main themes and methods of the subject, thus helping students develop an intuition for how to model uncertainty into mathematical problems, what uncertainty changes bring to the decision process, and what techniques help to manage uncertainty in solving the problems. The early chapters introduce some worked examples of stochastic programming, demonstrate how a stochastic model is formally built, develop the properties of stochastic programs and the basic solution techniques used to solve them. The book then goes on to cover approximation and sampling techniques and is rounded off by an in-depth case study. A well-paced and wide-ranging introduction to this subject.

The aim of stochastic programming is to find optimal decisions in problems which involve uncertain data. This field is currently developing rapidly with contributions from many disciplines including operations research, mathematics, and probability. At the same time, it is now being applied in a wide variety of subjects ranging from agriculture to financial planning and from industrial engineering to computer networks. This textbook provides a first course in stochastic programming suitable for students with a basic knowledge of linear programming, elementary analysis, and probability. The authors aim to present a broad overview of the main themes and methods of the subject. Its prime goal is to help students develop an intuition on how to model uncertainty into mathematical problems, what uncertainty changes bring to the decision process, and what techniques help to manage uncertainty in solving the problems. In this extensively updated new edition there is more material on methods and examples including several new approaches for discrete variables, new results on risk measures in modeling and Monte Carlo sampling methods, a new chapter on relationships to other methods including approximate dynamic programming, robust optimization and online methods. The book is highly illustrated with chapter summaries and many examples and exercises. Students, researchers and practitioners in operations research and the optimization area will find it particularly of interest. Review of First Edition: "The discussion on modeling issues, the large number of examples used to illustrate the material, and the breadth of the coverage make 'Introduction to Stochastic Programming' an ideal textbook for the area." (Interfaces, 1998)

From the Preface... The preparation of this book started in 2004, when George B. Dantzig and I, following a long-standing invitation by Fred Hillier to contribute a volume to his International Series in Operations Research and Management Science, decided finally to go ahead with editing a volume on stochastic programming. The field of stochastic programming (also referred to as optimization under uncertainty or planning under uncertainty) had advanced significantly in the last two decades, both theoretically and in practice. George Dantzig and I felt that it would be valuable to showcase some of these advances and to present what one might call the state-of- the-art of the field to a broader audience. We invited researchers whom we considered to be leading experts in various specialties of the field, including a few representatives of promising developments in the making, to write a chapter for the volume. Unfortunately, to the great loss of all of us, George Dantzig passed away on May 13, 2005. Encouraged by many colleagues, I decided to continue with the book and edit it as a volume dedicated to George Dantzig. Management Science published in 2005 a special volume featuring the “Ten most Influential Papers of the first 50 Years of Management Science.” George Dantzig’s original 1955 stochastic programming paper, “Linear Programming under Uncertainty,” was featured among these ten. Hearing about this, George Dantzig suggested that his 1955 paper be the first chapter of this book. The vision expressed in that paper gives an important scientific and historical perspective to the book. Gerd Infanger

Optimization problems are relevant in many areas of technical, industrial, and economic applications. At the same time, they pose challenging mathematical research problems in numerical analysis and optimization. Harald Held considers an elastic body subjected to uncertain internal and external forces. Since simply averaging the possible loadings will result in a structure that might not be robust for the individual loadings, he uses techniques from level set based shape optimization and two-stage stochastic programming. Taking advantage of the PDE’s linearity, he is able to compute solutions for an arbitrary number of scenarios without significantly increasing the computational effort. The author applies a gradient method using the shape derivative and the topological gradient to minimize, e.g., the compliance and shows that the obtained solutions strongly depend on the initial guess, in particular its topology. The stochastic programming perspective also allows incorporating risk measures into the model which might be a more appropriate objective in many practical applications.

Stochastic programming is the study of procedures for decision making under the presence of uncertainties and risks. Stochastic programming approaches have been successfully used in a number of areas such as energy and production planning, telecommunications, and transportation. Recently, the practical experience gained in stochastic programming has been expanded to a much larger spectrum of applications including financial modeling, risk management, and probabilistic risk analysis. Major topics in this volume include: (1) advances in theory and implementation of stochastic programming algorithms; (2) sensitivity analysis of stochastic systems; (3) stochastic programming applications and other related topics. Audience: Researchers and academies working in optimization, computer modeling, operations research and financial engineering. The book is appropriate as supplementary reading in courses on optimization and financial engineering.

Adaptive Stochastic Optimization Techniques with Applications provides a single, convenient source for state-of-the-art information on optimization techniques used to solve problems with adaptive, dynamic, and stochastic features. Presenting modern advances in static and dynamic optimization, decision analysis, intelligent systems, evolutionary pro

This volume presents a collection of contributions dedicated to applied problems in the financial and energy sectors that have been formulated and solved in a stochastic optimization framework. The invited authors represent a group of scientists and practitioners, who cooperated in recent years to facilitate the growing penetration of stochastic programming techniques in real-world applications, inducing a significant advance over a large spectrum of complex decision problems. After the recent widespread liberalization of the energy sector in Europe and the unprecedented growth of energy prices in international commodity markets, we have witnessed a significant convergence of strategic decision problems in the energy and financial sectors. This has often resulted in common open issues and has induced a remarkable effort by the industrial and scientific communities to facilitate the adoption of advanced analytical and decision tools. The main concerns of the financial community over the last decade have suddenly penetrated the energy sector inducing a remarkable scientific and practical effort to address previously unforeseeable management problems. Stochastic Optimization Methods in Finance and Energy: New Financial Products and Energy Markets Strategies aims to include in a unified framework for the first time an extensive set of contributions related to real-world applied problems in finance and energy, leading to a common methodological approach and in many cases having similar underlying economic and financial implications. Part 1 of the book presents 6 chapters related to financial applications; Part 2 presents 7 chapters on energy applications; and Part 3 presents 5 chapters devoted to specific theoretical and computational issues.

This book shows the breadth and depth of stochastic programming applications. All the papers presented here involve optimization over the scenarios that represent possible future outcomes of the uncertainty problems. The applications, which were presented at the 12th International Conference on Stochastic Programming held in Halifax, Nova Scotia in August 2010, span the rich field of uses of these models. The finance papers discuss such diverse problems as longevity risk management of individual investors, personal financial planning, intertemporal surplus management, asset management with benchmarks, dynamic portfolio management, fixed income immunization and racetrack betting. The production and logistics papers discuss natural gas infrastructure design, farming Atlantic salmon, prevention of nuclear smuggling and sawmill planning. The energy papers involve electricity production planning, hydroelectric reservoir operations and power generation planning for liquid natural gas plants. Finally, two telecommunication papers discuss mobile network design and frequency assignment problems.

The author presents two concepts to handle the classic linear mixed-integer two-stage stochastic optimization problem. She describes mean-risk modeling and stochastic programming with first order dominance constraints. Both approaches are applied to optimize the operation of a dispersed generation system.