In stochastic optimisation, the large number of scenarios required to faithfully represent the underlying uncertainty is often a barrier to finding efficient numerical solutions. This motivates the scenario reduction problem: by find a smaller subset of scenarios, reduce the numerical complexity while keeping the error at an acceptable level.In this paper we propose a novel and computationally efficient methodology to tackle the scenario reduction problem when the error to be minimised is the implementation error, i.e. the error incurred by implementing the solution of the reduced problem in the original problem. Specifically, we develop a problem-driven scenario clustering method that produces a partition of the scenario set. Each cluster contains a representative scenario that best reflects the conditional objective values in each cluster of the partition to be identified.We demonstrate the efficiency of our method by applying it to two challenging stochastic combinatorial optimization problems: the two-stage stochastic network design problem and the two-stage facility location problem. When compared to alternative clustering methods and Monte Carlo sampling, our method is shown to clearly outperform all other methods.

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Stochastic programming problems generally lead to large-scale programs if the number of random outcomes is large or if the problem has many stages. A way to tackle them is provided by scenario-tree generation methods, which construct approximate problems from a reduced subset of outcomes. However, it is well known that the number of scenarios required to keep the approximation error within a given tolerance grows rapidly with the number of random parameters and stages. For this reason, to limit the fast growth of complexity, scenario-tree generation methods tailored to problems must be developed. These will use more information about the problem than just the underlying probability distributions; namely, they will also take into account the objective function and the constraints. In this paper, we develop a general framework to build problem-driven scenario trees. We do so by studying how the optimal-value error arises as a sum of lower-level errors made at each node of the tree. We show how these small but numerous node errors depend on the specific features of the problem and how they can be controlled by designing scenario trees with appropriate branching structures and discretization points and weights. We illustrate our approach on two examples.

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