학술논문

Reliability and decomposition techniques to solve certain class of stochastic programming problems
Document Type
Article
Source
Reliability Engineering & System Safety. Feb2011, Vol. 96 Issue 2, p314-323. 10p.
Subject
*RELIABILITY in engineering
*MATHEMATICAL decomposition
*STOCHASTIC programming
*BOUNDARY value problems
*DECISION making
*UNCERTAINTY (Information theory)
*STRUCTURAL design
*PRODUCTION control
Language
ISSN
0951-8320
Abstract
Abstract: Reliability based techniques has been an area of active research in structural design during the last decade, and different methods have been developed. The same has occurred with stochastic programming, which is a framework for modeling optimization problems involving uncertainty. The discipline of stochastic programming has grown and broadened to cover a wide range of applications, such as agriculture, capacity planning, energy, finance, fisheries management, production control, scheduling, transportation, water management, etc., and because of this, techniques for solving stochastic programming models are of great interest for the scientific community. This paper presents a new approach for solving a certain type of stochastic programming problems presenting the following characteristics: (i) the joint probability distributions of random variables are given, (ii) these do not depend on the decisions made, and (iii) random variables only affect the objective function. The method is based on mathematical programming decomposition procedures and first-order reliability methods, and constitutes an efficient method for optimizing quantiles in high-dimensional settings. The solution provided by the method allows us to make informed decisions accounting for uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]