Affine recourse for the robust network design problem: Between static and dynamic routing

Affinely-Adjustable Robust Counterparts are used to provide tractable alternatives to (two-stage) robust programs with arbitrary recourse. We apply them to robust network design with polyhedral demand uncertainty, introducing the affine routing principle. We compare the affine routing to the well-studied static and dynamic routing schemes for robust network design. It is shown that affine routing can be seen as a generalization of the widely used static routing still being tractable and providing cheaper solutions. We investigate properties on the demand polytope under which affine routings reduce to static routings and also develop conditions on the uncertainty set leading to dynamic routings being affine. We show however that affine routings suffer from the drawback that (even strongly) dominated demand vectors are not necessarily supported by affine solutions. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.SCOPUS: cp.k