Research Article
A Bicriteria Approach Identifying Nondominated Portfolios
Javier Pereira,
1
Broderick Crawford,
2,3
Fernando Paredes,
1
and Ricardo Soto
2,4
1
Escuela de Ingenier´ ıa Industrial, Universidad Diego Portales, 8370179 Santiago, Chile
2
Pontifcia Universidad Cat´ olica de Valpara´ ıso, 2362807 Valpara´ ıso, Chile
3
Universidad Finis Terrae, 7500000 Santiago, Chile
4
Universidad Aut´ onoma de Chile, 7500000 Santiago, Chile
Correspondence should be addressed to Broderick Crawford; broderick.crawford@ucv.cl
Received 27 February 2014; Accepted 18 June 2014; Published 3 July 2014
Academic Editor: Mohammad Khodabakhshi
Copyright © 2014 Javier Pereira et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
We explore a portfolio constructive model, formulated in terms of satisfaction of a given set of technical requirements, with the
minimum number of projects and minimum redundancy. An algorithm issued from robust portfolio modeling is adapted to a
vector model, modifying the dominance condition as convenient, in order to fnd the set of nondominated portfolios, as solutions
of a bicriteria integer linear programming problem. In order to improve the former algorithm, a process fnding an optimal solution
of a monocriteria version of this problem is proposed, which is further used as a frst feasible solution aiding to fnd nondominated
solutions more rapidly. Next, a sorting process is applied on the input data or information matrix, which is intended to prune
nonfeasible solutions early in the constructive algorithm. Numerical examples show that the optimization and sorting processes
both improve computational efciency of the original algorithm. Teir limits are also shown on certain complex instances.
1. Introduction
Markowitz provided one of the frst comprehensive theoreti-
cal frameworks for the portfolio selection problem [1]. In his
proposal, each portfolio is evaluated in terms of the expected
return and risk. Ten, the efcient set, or efcient frontier,
corresponds to all portfolios with the largest expected return,
given a level of risk. From this framework, the expected return
is usually evaluated as the weighted sum of the expected
return from each project in the portfolio, while the risk value
is evaluated by the variance of the portfolio. Tus, the investor
may select the portfolios in the efcient frontier that best
match her/his needs.
In portfolio selection two vectors are defned [2]. First, the
investment proportion vector corresponds to the proportion
of money that the investor accepts to invest on each member
of a set of securities (projects). Te criteria vector, instead,
contains the values of measures evaluating the portfolio. In
this sense, an efcient portfolio, in terms of the frst vector, is
a nondominated portfolio, in the sense of the second one. A
multicriteria portfolio selection problem supposes a criteria
vector with three or more criteria [3], which is expected to
be more difcult in terms of computing of nondominated
portfolios. However, below, we show that depending on what
it is to be taken into account as an evaluation measure,
even with two criteria the generation of portfolios is a hard
combinatorial problem.
Since the portfolio selection problem intrinsically incor-
porates business criteria, budget restrictions, and returns
volatility [4], in the literature the problem is formulated as
the maximization of the expected return, under uncertainty
of returns. When the multicriteria version is considered,
several utility functions need to be maximized, subject to
constrains defning the feasible portfolios [1, 4, 5]. In this
context, nondominated portfolios may be computed using
multiobjective algorithms [6], evolutionary methods for mul-
tiobjective models [7, 8], or preference programming [9].
In this article, we focus on the portfolio generation
process, when business, budget, or even volatility information
is poor. Several stringent situations obligate to split the project
portfolio selection process into at least two phases: technical
and business concerns. We place ourselves in the frst phase
and formulate our problem in terms of satisfaction of a given
set of technical requirements, with the minimum number
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
Journal of Applied Mathematics
Volume 2014, Article ID 957108, 8 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/957108