Two-Stage Data-Driven Contextual Robust Optimization: An End-to-End Learning Approach for Online Energy Applications

Abstract

Traditional end-to-end contextual robust optimization models are trained for specific contextual data, requiring complete retraining whenever new contextual information arrives. This limitation hampers their use in online decision-making problems such as energy scheduling, where multiperiod optimization must be solved every few minutes. In this paper, we propose a novel Data-Driven Contextual Uncertainty Set, which gives rise to a new End-to-End Data-Driven Contextual Robust Optimization model. For right-hand-side uncertainty, we introduce a reformulation scheme that enables the development of a variant of the Column-and-Constraint Generation (CCG) algorithm. This new CCG method explicitly considers the contextual vector within the cut expressions, allowing previously generated cuts to remain valid for new contexts, thereby significantly accelerating convergence in online applications. Numerical experiments on energy and reserve scheduling problems, based on classical test cases and large-scale networks (with more than 10,000 nodes), demonstrate that the proposed method reduces computation times and operational costs while capturing context-dependent risk structures. The proposed framework (model and method), therefore, offers a unified, scalable, and prescriptive approach to robust decision-making under uncertainty, effectively bridging data-driven learning and optimization.