Generative Robust Optimisation

Abstract

Classical uncertainty sets for robust optimisation impose fixed geometric shapes that cannot represent the complex dependencies present in real-world data. We propose Generative Robust Optimisation (GRO), a framework in which a deep generative model defines the uncertainty set as the image of a neural network decoder over a calibrated latent set, naturally accommodating nonlinear correlations, asymmetry, and multimodality. A five-point evaluation framework (reconstruction fidelity, distribution matching, latent regularity, robust relevance, and computational tractability) provides systematic, model-agnostic criteria for assessing any neural network-based uncertainty set. We instantiate this framework with a Wasserstein Adversarial Autoencoder employing Gaussian mixture model-guided training for latent regularity and constraint-consistency regularisation for robust relevance. Restricting the decoder to ReLU activations enables exact worst-case verification through mixed-integer programming embedding. Extensive experiments on a production planning problem across six uncertainty distributions and six generative architectures, together with a multi-period facility location study, validate the framework and demonstrate that systematic attention to all five criteria yields uncertainty sets that are simultaneously expressive, well-calibrated, and optimisation-tractable.