Bounds for multistage mixed-integer distributionally robust optimization

Multistage mixed-integer distributionally robust optimization (DRO) forms a class of extremely challenging problems since their size grows exponentially with the number of stages. One way to model the uncertainty in multistage DRO is by creating sets of conditional distributions (the so-called conditional ambiguity sets) on a finite scenario tree and requiring that such distributions remain close to nominal conditional distributions according to some measure of similarity/distance (e.g., phi -divergences or Wasserstein distance). In this paper, new bounding criteria for this class of difficult decision problems are provided through scenario grouping using the ambiguity sets associated with various commonly used phi -divergences and the Wasserstein distance. Our approach does not require any special problem structure such as linearity, convexity, stagewise independence, and so forth. Therefore, while we focus on multistage mixed-integer DRO, our bounds can be applied to a wide range of DRO problems including two-stage and multistage, with or without integer variables, convex or nonconvex, and nested or nonnested formulations. Numerical results on a multistage mixed-integer production problem show the efficiency of the proposed approach through different choices of partition strategies, ambiguity sets, and levels of robustness.