Title: A heuristical approach for Farmer's problem with uniform continuous random yields

Authors: Murat Kurt

Addresses: School of Engineering, Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, 1048 Benedum Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA

Abstract: The L-shaped method is useful for solving two-stage stochastic linear programming problems which have the form of a master problem and several subproblems represented by the side model. In order to make this approach possible, the random vector ξ, which is bringing the uncertainty into the model, must have finite support. With finite support we may write the deterministic equivalent program in the extensive form which is solvable by decomposition. To avoid the problems arising from the random elements that have continuous probability distributions, an approximate discretisation is needed. In this paper, the uniform continuous probability distributions of the yields in the Farmer|s problem are discretised by using one of the low-discrepancy sequences, called Faure sequence, and based on the obtained approximate discrete distribution a heuristic is proposed to approximate the solution to the problem.

Keywords: two-stage linear programming; stochastic linear programming; low discrepancy sequences; uniform probability distributions; continuous probability distributions; Farmer|s problem; uncertainty.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2009.022599

International Journal of Operational Research, 2009 Vol.4 No.2, pp.178 - 196

Published online: 18 Jan 2009 *

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