Contributions to complementarity and bilevel programming in Banach spaces

In this thesis, we derive necessary optimality conditions for bilevel programming problems (BPPs for short) in Banach spaces. This rather abstract setting reflects our desire to characterize the local optimal solutions of hierarchical optimization problems in function spaces arising from several applications. Since our considerations are based on the tools of variational analysis introduced by Boris Mordukhovich, we study related properties of pointwise defined sets in function spaces. The presence of sequential normal compactness for such sets in Lebesgue and Sobolev spaces as well as the variational geometry of decomposable sets in Lebesgue spaces is discussed. Afterwards, we investigate mathematical problems with complementarity constraints (MPCCs for short) in Banach spaces which are closely related to BPPs. We introduce reasonable stationarity concepts and constraint qualifications which can be used to handle MPCCs. The relations between the mentioned stationarity notions are studied in the setting where the underlying complementarity cone is polyhedric. The results are applied to the situations where the complementarity cone equals the nonnegative cone in a Lebesgue space or is polyhedral. Next, we use the three main approaches of transforming a BPP into a single-level program (namely the presence of a unique lower level solution, the KKT approach, and the optimal value approach) to derive necessary optimality conditions for BPPs. Furthermore, we comment on the relation between the original BPP and the respective surrogate problem. We apply our findings to formulate necessary optimality conditions for three different classes of BPPs. First, we study a BPP with semidefinite lower level problem possessing a unique solution. Afterwards, we deal with bilevel optimal control problems with dynamical systems of ordinary differential equations at both decision levels. Finally, an optimal control problem of ordinary or partial differential equations with implicitly given pointwise state constraints is investigated

Data-driven Inverse Optimization with Imperfect Information

In data-driven inverse optimization an observer aims to learn the preferences of an agent who solves a parametric optimization problem depending on an exogenous signal. Thus, the observer seeks the agent's objective function that best explains a historical sequence of signals and corresponding optimal actions. We focus here on situations where the observer has imperfect information, that is, where the agent's true objective function is not contained in the search space of candidate objectives, where the agent suffers from bounded rationality or implementation errors, or where the observed signal-response pairs are corrupted by measurement noise. We formalize this inverse optimization problem as a distributionally robust program minimizing the worst-case risk that the {\em predicted} decision ({\em i.e.}, the decision implied by a particular candidate objective) differs from the agent's {\em actual} response to a random signal. We show that our framework offers rigorous out-of-sample guarantees for different loss functions used to measure prediction errors and that the emerging inverse optimization problems can be exactly reformulated as (or safely approximated by) tractable convex programs when a new suboptimality loss function is used. We show through extensive numerical tests that the proposed distributionally robust approach to inverse optimization attains often better out-of-sample performance than the state-of-the-art approaches

Packing ellipsoids with overlap

The problem of packing ellipsoids of different sizes and shapes into an ellipsoidal container so as to minimize a measure of overlap between ellipsoids is considered. A bilevel optimization formulation is given, together with an algorithm for the general case and a simpler algorithm for the special case in which all ellipsoids are in fact spheres. Convergence results are proved and computational experience is described and illustrated. The motivating application - chromosome organization in the human cell nucleus - is discussed briefly, and some illustrative results are presented

A Prescriptive Trilevel Equilibrium Model for Optimal Emissions Pricing and Sustainable Energy Systems Development

We explore the class of trilevel equilibrium problems with a focus on energy-environmental applications. In particular, we apply this trilevel framework to a power market model, exploring the possibilities of an international policymaker in reducing emissions of the system. We present two alternative solution methods for such problems and a comparison of the resulting model sizes. The first method is based on a reformulation of the bottom-level solution set, and the second one uses strong duality. The first approach results in optimality conditions that are both necessary and sufficient, while the second one results in a model with fewer constraints but only sufficient optimality conditions. Using the proposed methods, we are able to obtain globally optimal solutions for a realistic five-node case study representing the Nordic countries and assess the impact of a carbon tax on the electricity production portfolio.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure