Coping with Uncertainty: Robust Solutions (Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems)

Kurt Marti, Yuri Ermoliev, Marek Makowski Springer | English | 2009-12-10 | ISBN: 3642037348 | 277 pages | PDF | 3 MB

Support for addressing the on-going global changes needs solutions for new scientific problems which in turn require new concepts and tools. A key issue concerns a vast variety of irreducible uncertainties, including extreme events of high multidimensional consequences, e.g., the climate change. The dilemma is concerned with enormous costs versus massive uncertainties of extreme impacts. Traditional scientific approaches rely on real observations and experiments. Yet no sufficient observations exist for new problems, and pure experiments, and learning by doing may be expensive, dangerous, or impossible. In addition, the available historical observations are often contaminated by past actions, and policies. Thus, tools are presented for the explicit treatment of uncertainties using synthetic information composed of available hard data from historical observations, the results of possible experiments, and scientific facts, as well as soft data from experts' opinions, and scenarios.