We address a variant of the single item lot sizing problem affected by proportional storage (or inventory) losses and uncertainty in the product demand. The problem has applications in, among others, the energy sector, where storage losses (or storage deteriorations) are often unavoidable and, due to the need for planning ahead, the demands can be largely uncertain. We first propose a two-stage robust optimization approach with second-stage storage variables, showing how the arising robust problem can be solved as an instance of the deterministic one. We then consider a two-stage approach where not only the storage but also the production variables are determined in the second stage. After showing that, in the general case, solutions to this problem can suffer from acausality (or anticipativity), we introduce a flexible affine rule approach which, albeit restricting the solution set, allows for causal production plans. A hybrid robust-stochastic approach where the objective function is optimized in expectation, as opposed to in the worst-case, while retaining robust optimization guarantees of feasibility in the worst-case, is also discussed. We conclude with an application to This work is partially supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, BMWi, Grant 03ET7528B. Comb Optim (2018) 36:763-788 heat production, in the context of which we compare the different approaches via computational experiments on real-world data.
Abstract. We consider a variant of the single item lot sizing problem where the product, when stored, suffers from a proportional loss, and in which the product demand is affected by uncertainty. This setting is particularly relevant in the energy sector, where the demands must be satisfied in a timely manner and storage losses are, often, unavoidable. We propose a two-stage robust optimization approach to tackle the problem with second stage storage variables. We first show that, in the case of uncertain demands, the robust problem can be solved as an instance of the deterministic one. We then address an application of robust lot sizing arising in the context of heat and power cogeneration and show that, even in this case, we can solve the problem as an instance of the deterministic lot sizing problem. Computational experiments are reported and illustrated.
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