LAMIH Seminar "Decision-based scenario clustering and its applications for decision making under uncertainty".

Summary:

In order to make sense of future uncertainty, managers have long resorted to creating scenarios that are then used to evaluate how uncertainty affects decision making. The large number of scenarios required to accurately represent several sources of uncertainty leads to major computational challenges when using these scenarios in a decision support context.  Moreover, the complexity induced by the large number of scenarios may prevent decision makers from reasoning about the interaction between the uncertainty modeled by the data and the decision-making processes (i.e., how uncertainty affects the decisions to be made). To address this challenge, we propose a novel clustering approach to group scenarios based on their associated decisions.  In this talk, we will show how the use of this scenario clustering method can be used to 1) derive efficient bounds for stochastic optimization models and 2) effectively deal with the ambiguity of contextual information in humanitarian decision making.

Presenter: brief biography

Walter Rei is a Professor of Operations Research in the Department of Analytics, Operations and Information Technology at the School of Management Sciences, University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada. He currently holds the Canada Research Chair in Stochastic Optimization of Transportation and Logistics Systems and is also a member of the Interuniversity Research Center on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT). His research interests include the development of efficient methodologies for solving stochastic integer programs and combinatorial optimization models relevant to transportation and logistics problems.

Contact: Ioana Bilegan