CORC Technical Report TR-2004-10 Ambiguous chance constrained problems and robust optimization

In this paper we study ambiguous chance constrained problems where the distributions of the random parameters in the problem are themselves uncertain. We primarily focus on the special case where the uncertainty set Q of the distributions is of the form Q = {Q : ρp(Q, Q0) ≤ β}, where ρp denotes the Prohorov metric. The ambiguous chance constrained problem is approximated by a robust sampled problem where each constraint is a robust constraint centered at a sample drawn according to the central measure Q0. The main contribution of this paper is to show that the robust sampled problem is a good approximation for the ambiguous chance constrained problem with high probability. This result is established using the Strassen-Dudley Representation Theorem that states that when the distributions of two random variables are close in the Prohorov metric one can construct a coupling of the random variables such that the samples are close with high probability. We also show that the robust sampled problem can be solved efficiently both in theory and in practice.