Strategic Decisions and Uncertainties

In many real-life optimization problems, calculating and implementing optimal solutions to the underlying system is very challenging. Relevant information might only be known step-by-step or could even remain uncertain to the end. The problems might be too complex to be solved efficiently or a decision maker might be unable to implement a calculated solution due to externally given rules. In this work, we study four different optimization problems under the uncertainty aspects mentioned above. We define and analyze a competitive variant of the packet routing problem, we study natural and fast approximation algorithms for the resource allocation problem, we consider a dynamic setting of prophet inequalities with a minimization objective, and finally, we analyze solution concepts for robust and dynamic network flows.