A Largest Empty Hypersphere Metaheuristic for Robust Optimisation with Implementation Uncertainty∗ Martin Hughesy 1, Marc Goerigk2, and Michael Wright1 1Department of Management Science, Lancaster University, United Kingdom 2University of Siegen, Germany We consider box-constrained robust optimisation problems with im- plementation uncertainty. In this setting, the solution that a decision maker wants to implement may become perturbed. The aim is to find a solution that optimises the worst possible performance over all possible perturbances. Previously, only few generic search methods have been developed for this setting. We introduce a new approach for a global search, based on placing a largest empty hypersphere. We do not assume any knowledge on the structure of the original objective function, making this approach also viable for simulation-optimisation settings. In com- putational experiments we demonstrate a strong performance of our approach in comparison with state-of-the-art methods, which makes it possible to solve even high-dimensional problems. Keywords: robust optimisation; implementation uncertainty; meta- arXiv:1809.02437v1 [math.OC] 7 Sep 2018 heuristics; global optimisation ∗Funded through EPSRC grants EP/L504804/1 and EP/M506369/1. yCorresponding author. Email:
[email protected] 1 1. Introduction The use of models to support informed decision making is ubiquitous. However, the size and nature of the decision variable solution space, and the model runtime, may make a comprehensive { exhaustive or simply extensive { evaluation of the problem space computationally infeasible. In such cases an efficient approach is required to search for global optima. Mathematical programs are one form of model that are explicitly formulated as optimisation problems, where the model representation imposes assumptions on the structure of the decision variable space and objective function.