A stochastic benders decomposition scheme for large-scale stochastic network design
File(s)2303.07695v2.pdf (2.48 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Bertsimas, Dimitris
Cory-Wright, Ryan
Pauphilet, Jean
Petridis, Periklis
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Network design problems involve constructing edges in a transportation or supply chain network to minimize construction and daily operational costs. We study a stochastic version where operational costs are uncertain because of fluctuating demand and estimated as a sample average from historical data. This problem is computationally challenging, and instances with as few as 100 nodes often cannot be solved to optimality using current decomposition techniques. We propose a stochastic variant of Benders decomposition that mitigates the high computational cost of generating each cut by sampling a subset of the data at each iteration and nonetheless, generates deterministically valid cuts, via a dual averaging technique, rather than the probabilistically valid cuts frequently proposed in the stochastic optimization literature. We implement both single-cut and multicut variants of this Benders decomposition as well as a variant that uses clustering of the historical scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first single-tree implementation of Benders decomposition that facilitates sampling. On instances with 100–200 nodes and relatively complete recourse, our algorithm achieves 5%–7% optimality gaps compared with 16%–27% for deterministic Benders schemes, and it scales to instances with 700 nodes and 50 commodities within hours. Beyond network design, our strategy could be adapted to generic two-stage stochastic mixed-integer optimization problems where second-stage costs are estimated via a sample average.
Date Issued
2025-09-01
Date Acceptance
2024-10-24
Citation
Informs Journal on Computing, 2025, 37 (5), pp.1163-1181
ISSN
1091-9856
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences
Start Page
1163
End Page
1181
Journal / Book Title
Informs Journal on Computing
Volume
37
Issue
5
Copyright Statement
© 2024, INFORMS
License URL
Identifier
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/ijoc.2023.0074
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2024-11-21