11 research outputs found
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A decision model for natural oil buying policy under uncertainty
A manufacturer, in a fast moving consumer goods industry, buys Natural oils from a number of oil suppliers world-wide. The prices of these oils are the major raw material cost in producing the consumer goods, which are also sold world-wide. The volatility in the international prices of the Natural oils has signiÂŻcant impact on the planning and budgets decisions. Since the oils are bought and the ÂŻnished products are sold in markets throughout the world, the manufacturer is exposed to a variety of market uncertainties and the resulting risks. These uncertainties are the raw material prices, the demand and the therefore the selling prices for the finished goods- all of which influence the profitability of the manufacturing firm. The risks can be minimised by entering into futures contract of appropriate duration, that is, by following a schedule of "forward"' purchase of oil (with specific series of future delivery dates) with the oil suppliers. We formulate this problem as a two-stage Stochastic Program (SP) using the futures and the spot prices for the Natural oil. This SP model gives robust decisions that hedge against the uncertainties in the Natural oil prices and the demand for the finished products. The uncertainty in the oil prices and the demand are
modelled through a scenario generator. We have constructed a decision support system (DSS) that integrates the SP model, the scenario generator and the solution algorithm. This DSS also provides the decision maker a profile of the risk and return exposures for different policies
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Revisiting lagrange relaxation (LR) for processing large-scale mixed integer programming (MIP) problems
Lagrangean Relaxation has been successfully applied to process many well known
instances of NP-hard Mixed Integer Programming problems. In this paper we present
a Lagrangean Relaxation based generic solver for processing Mixed Integer
Programming problems. We choose the constraints, which are relaxed using a
constraint classification scheme. The tactical issue of updating the Lagrange
multiplier is addressed through sub-gradient optimisation; alternative rules for
updating their values are investigated. The Lagrangean relaxation provides a lower
bound to the original problem and the upper bound is calculated using a heuristic
technique. The bounds obtained by the Lagrangean Relaxation based generic solver
were used to warm-start the Branch and Bound algorithm; the performance of the
generic solver and the effect of the alternative control settings are reported for a wide
class of benchmark models. Finally, we present an alternative technique to calculate
the upper bound, using a genetic algorithm that benefits from the mathematical
structure of the constraints. The performance of the genetic algorithm is also
presented
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An investigation into approximate solutions for deterministic and stochastic multi-dimensional sequencing
A description is given of an investigation in detail into the validity of the overlap integral method for describing planar optical waveguide junctions. A comparison between the results of this method and that of a rigorous mode-matching approach is taken
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Software tools for stochastic programming: A Stochastic Programming Integrated Environment (SPInE)
SP models combine the paradigm of dynamic linear programming with
modelling of random parameters, providing optimal decisions which hedge
against future uncertainties. Advances in hardware as well as software
techniques and solution methods have made SP a viable optimisation tool.
We identify a growing need for modelling systems which support the creation
and investigation of SP problems. Our SPInE system integrates a number of
components which include a flexible modelling tool (based on stochastic
extensions of the algebraic modelling languages AMPL and MPL), stochastic
solvers, as well as special purpose scenario generators and database tools.
We introduce an asset/liability management model and illustrate how SPInE
can be used to create and process this model as a multistage SP application