Multiobjective Optimization

Multiobjective optimization (making "optimal" decisions involving multiple, frequently conflicting, criteria) is a big subject. I will only nibble at the fringes of it here. In the next post, I'll describe recent additions to CPLEX that facilitate solving some multiobjective problems.

Among the various approaches to multiobjective problems, two are probably the most common, weighting and prioritization. The first approach is to merge the various criteria into a single one, usually (almost always?) by taking a weighted sum of the criteria. The CPLEX documentation refers to this as a blended objective. For this to make sense, the units of the various criteria really should be commensurable (e.g., all monetary values), but I'm pretty sure having criteria that are not commensurable doesn't stop people from trying. The weights serve two roles. First, they bring the units into some semblance of parity (so if $f()$ is in dollars and $g()$ in millions of dollars, $g()$ gets a weight roughly on millionth the size of the weight of $f()$). Second, they convey relative importance of various criteria.

The second approach is to prioritize the criteria. The solver initially optimizes the highest priority criterion, without regard to any others. Once an optimal value of the highest priority criterion is known, maintaining that value becomes a constraint, and the solver moves to the second highest priority criterion, and so on. The CPLEX documentation refers to this as a lexicographic objective, meaning that the objective function is vector-valued rather than scalar-valued, and optimization means achieving the lexicographically largest or smallest objective vector possible. A variant of this allows a little "slippage" in the value of each criterion, so that for example the solver can accept a solution that is 1% below optimal on the first criterion in return for optimizing the second criterion. A key limitation here is the solver will trade any amount of degradation in a lower priority criterion, no matter how much, for any improvement in a higher priority criterion, no matter how small.

Although they are not relevant to the recent CPLEX additions, I will mention two other approaches. One is a variant of the priority method, known as goal programming (GP). This was originally developed as an extension of linear programming, but the same general approach can be extended to problems with integer variables. The user sets target levels for each criterion, and then prioritizes them. If a goal is underachieved, work on meeting lower priority goals cannot sacrifice any amount of the higher priority criterion. On the other hand, if a goal is overachieved, any portion of the overachievement can be sacrificed in the quest to reach a lower priority goal. An interesting attribute of goal programming is that the same criterion can be used with more than one goal. Suppose that you are building a GP model allocating a budget to various conservation projects. Your highest priority goal might be to allocate at least 50% of the budget to projects in underserved communities (USCs, to save me typing, with apologies to the universities of South Carolina and Southern Califonia). Your second highest priority goal might be to allocate at least 30% of the budget to projects with matching funds from outside sources. Your third highest priority goal might be to allocate at least 75% of the budget to USCs. The other approach is to investigate the Pareto frontier, the set of all solutions for which no other solution does as well in all criteria and better in at least one. In essence, you want to present the decision-maker with the entire Pareto frontier and say "here, pick one". In practice, computing the Pareto frontier can be very computationally expensive, and trying to make sense of it might cause the decision maker to melt down.

To close this post, I'll pose a small sample problem and formulate the model for it. Suppose that we have $N$ patients in a health care system and $M$ providers, and that each patient needs to be assigned to a single provider. Provider $j$ has a limit $c_j$ on the number of patients they can handle. (To keep the example simple, and at the expense of some realism, we treat all patients as identical with regard to their capacity consumption.) We are given a matrix $D\in \mathbb{R}^{N\times M}$ of distances from patients to providers, as well as a cap $D_{max}$ on the distance that a patient can be required to travel. There are four criteria to be considered:

• the average distance patients will travel (minimize, highest priority);
• the maximum distance any patient must travel (minimize, second highest priority);
• the maximum utilization of any provider as a fraction of their capacity (minimize, tied for third highest priority); and
• the minimum utilization of any provider as a fraction of their capacity (maximize, tied for third highest priority).

So we have a mix of three things to minimize and one to maximize, with the last two criteria combining to somewhat level the workload across providers. 

Let $x_{ij}$ be 1 if patient $i$ is assigned to provider $j$ and 0 if not, let $w$ be the longest distance traveled by any patient, let $y_j$ be the fraction of provider $j$'s capacity that is utilized, and let $z_{lo}$ and $z_{hi}$ be the minimum and maximum capacity utilization rates, respectively (where 0 means the provider is unused and 1 means the provider is operating at capacity). The objective expression is $f\in\mathbb{R}^3$, whose lexicographic minimum we seek, where

\[ f=\left[\begin{array}{c} \frac{1}{N}\sum_{i=1}^{N}\sum_{j=1}^{M}d_{ij}x_{ij}\\ w\\ z_{hi}-z_{lo} \end{array}\right]. \]

The first and second components of $f$ are the average and maximum client travel distances. The third component is a weighted mix of maximum and minimum provider utilization, where the weights (+1, -1) are equal in magnitude to reflect the equal importance I am assigning to them and the negative coefficient for minimum utilization allows it to be maximized in what is otherwise a minimization problem.

The constraints of the model are easy to state:

\begin{align*} \sum_{j=1}^{M}x_{ij} & =1\quad\forall i\in\left\{ 1,\dots,N\right\} & (1)\\ d_{ij}x_{ij} & \le w\quad\forall i\in\left\{ 1,\dots,N\right\} ,\forall j\in\left\{ 1,\dots,M\right\} & (2)\\ \frac{1}{c_{j}}\sum_{i=1}^{N}x_{ij} & =y_{j}\quad\forall j\in\left\{ 1,\dots,M\right\} & (3)\\ y_{j} & \le z_{hi}\quad\forall j\in\left\{ 1,\dots,M\right\} & (4)\\ y_{j} & \ge z_{lo}\quad\forall j\in\left\{ 1,\dots,M\right\} & (5)\\ x & \in\left\{ 0,1\right\} ^{N\times M} & (6)\\ x_{ij} & =0\quad\forall i,j\ni d_{ij}>D_{max} & (7)\\ y & \in\left[0,1\right]^{M} & (8)\\ z_{hi},z_{lo} & \in\left[0,1\right] & (9)\\ w & \in\left[0,D_{max}\right] & (10) \end{align*} 

• Constraint (1) ensures that each patient is assigned to exactly one provider.
• Constraint (2) defines $w$, the maximum distance traveled.
• Constraint (3) defines the fraction $y_j$ of capacity used at each provider $j$.
• Constraints (4) and (5) define $z_{lo}$ and $z_{hi}$.
• Constraints (6), (8), (9) and (10) define variable domains. The upper bound of 1 for $y_j$ in (8) ensures that no provider is assigned more patients than their capacity allows.
• Constraint (7) enforces the travel distance limit $D_{max}$ by preventing any assignments that would violate the limit (effectively removing those assignment variables from the model).

In the next post, I will show how to solve the model using CPLEX (with, as usual, the Java API).