Optimizing subscriber migrations for a telecommunication operator in uncertain context

We consider a telecommunications company expanding its network capacity to face an increasing demand. The company can also invest in marketing to incentivize clients to shift to more recent technologies, hopefully leading to cheaper overall costs. To model the effect of the marketing campaigns, previous works have relied on the Bass model. Since that model only provides a rough approximation of the actual shifting mechanism, the purpose of this work is to consider uncertainty in the shifting mechanism through the lens of robust optimization. We thus assume that the (discrete) shifting function can take any value in a given polytope and wish to optimize against the worst-case realization. The resulting robust optimization problem possesses integer recourse variables and non-linear dependencies on the uncertain parameters. We address these difficulties as follows. First, the integer recourse is tackled heuristically through a piece-wise constant policy dictated by a prior partition of the uncertainty polytope. Second, the non-linearities are handled by a careful analysis of the dominating scenarios. The scalability and economical relevance of our models are assessed through numerical experiments performed on real instances, underlining the benefit of using robust optimization.