A Second-Order Sufficient Optimality Condition for Risk-Neutral Bi-level Stochastic Linear Programs

The expectation functionals, which arise in risk-neutral bi-level stochastic linear models with random lower-level right-hand side, are known to be continuously differentiable, if the underlying probability measure has a Lebesgue density. We show that the gradient may fail to be local Lipschitz continuous under this assumption. Our main result provides sufficient conditions for Lipschitz continuity of the gradient of the expectation functional and paves the way for a second-order optimality condition in terms of generalized Hessians. Moreover, we study geometric properties of regions of strong stability and derive representation results, which may facilitate the computation of gradients.

Stochastic Decomposition for Two-Stage Stochastic Linear Programs with Random Cost Coefficients

Stochastic decomposition (SD) has been a computationally effective approach to solve large-scale stochastic programming (SP) problems arising in practical applications. By using incremental sampling, this approach is designed to discover an appropriate sample size for a given SP instance, thus precluding the need for either scenario reduction or arbitrary sample sizes to create sample average approximations (SAA). When compared with the solutions obtained using the SAA procedure, SD provides solutions of similar quality in far less computational time using ordinarily available computational resources. However, previous versions of SD were not applicable to problems with randomness in second-stage cost coefficients. In this paper, we extend its capabilities by relaxing this assumption on cost coefficients in the second stage. In addition to the algorithmic enhancements necessary to achieve this, we also present the details of implementing these extensions, which preserve the computational edge of SD. Finally, we illustrate the computational results obtained from the latest implementation of SD on a variety of test instances generated for problems from the literature. We compare these results with those obtained from the regularized L-shaped method applied to the SAA function of these problems with different sample sizes.