In this article, we investigate the stochastic maximum weight forest problem. We present two mathematical formulations for the problem: a polynomial sized one based on the characterization of forests in graphs and a formulation with an exponential number of constraints. We give a proof of the correctness of the new formulation and present a polynomial reduction from the set cover problem to give some insight about the complexity of this problem. We introduce an L‐shaped decomposition approach for the polynomial formulation, thus allowing the optimal solution of large scale instances with up to 90 nodes. Finally, we propose a Kruskal based variable neighborhood search (VNS) metaheuristic to compute near optimal solutions with significantly less computational effort. Our numerical results show that the VNS approach provides tight near optimal solutions with a gap less than 1% for most of the instances. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 65(4), 289–305 2015

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In this paper, we study the stochastic knapsack problem with expectation constraint. We solve the relaxed version of this problem using a stochastic gradient algorithm in order to provide upper bounds for a branch-and-bound framework. Two approaches to estimate the needed gradients are studied, one based on Integration by Parts and one using Finite Differences. The Finite Differences method is a robust and simple approach with efficient results despite the fact that estimated gradients are biased, meanwhile Integration by Parts is based upon more theoretical analysis and permits to enlarge the field of applications. Numerical results on a dataset from the literature as well as a set of randomly generated instances are given.