Robust Optimization — Worst-Case Mathematical Programming

Robust optimization is a mathematical programming framework, formalised by Ben-Tal and Nemirovski in the late 1990s and made broadly tractable by Bertsimas and Sim (2004), that finds decisions guaranteed to perform acceptably under every scenario within a predefined uncertainty set — rather than assuming parameter values are known exactly. Instead of optimising for a single expected outcome, it minimises the worst-case objective across all plausible realisations of uncertain data.