For an electric power mix subject to uncertainty, the stochastic unit-commitment problem finds short-term optimal generation schedules that satisfy several system-wide constraints. In regulated electricity markets, this very practical and important problem is used by the system operator to decide when each unit is to be started or stopped, and to define how to generate … Read more
We extend the result on the spectral projected gradient method by Birgin et al in 2000 to a log-determinant semidefinite problem (SDP) with linear constraints and propose a spectral projected gradient method for the dual problem. Our method is based on alternate projections on the intersection of two convex sets, which first projects onto the … Read more
In this paper, a new method for determining all minimal representations of a face of a polyhedron is proposed. A main difficulty for determining prime and minimal representations of a face is that the deletion of one redundant constraint can change the redundancy of other constraints. To reduce computational efforts in finding all minimal representations … Read more
We develop a two-stage stochastic program for energy and reserve dispatch, which ensures the safe operation of a power system with a high penetration of renewables and a strong interdependence with the natural gas system. Distributionally robust joint chance constraints with Wasserstein ambiguity sets ensure that there is no need for load shedding and renewable … Read more
Concepts of consistency have long played a key role in constraint programming but never developed in integer programming (IP). Consistency nonetheless plays a role in IP as well. For example, cutting planes can reduce backtracking by achieving various forms of consistency as well as by tightening the linear programming (LP) relaxation. We introduce a type … Read more
As a special kind of recurrent neural networks, Zhang neural network (ZNN) has been successfully applied to various time-variant problems solving. In this paper, we first propose a special two-step Zhang et al. discretization (ZeaD) formula and a general two-step ZeaD formula, whose truncation errors are ${O}(\tau^3)$ and ${O}(\tau^2)$, respectively, and $\tau>0$ denotes the sampling … Read more
The computation of the Newton direction is the most time consuming step of interior-point methods. This direction was efficiently computed by a combination of Cholesky factorizations and conjugate gradients in a specialized interior-point method for block-angular structured problems. In this work we apply this algorithmic approach to solve very large instances of minimum cost flows … Read more
We consider the problem of decision-making in Markov decision processes (MDPs) when the reward or transition probability parameters are not known with certainty. We consider an approach in which the decision-maker (DM) considers multiple models of the parameters for an MDP and wishes to find a policy that optimizes an objective function that considers the … Read more
A block decomposition method is proposed for minimizing a (possibly non-convex) continuously differentiable function subject to one linear equality constraint and simple bounds on the variables. The proposed method iteratively selects a pair of coordinates according to an almost cyclic strategy that does not use first-order information, allowing us not to compute the whole gradient … Read more
Rapid urban growth, the increasing importance of e-commerce and high consumer service expectations have given rise to new and innovative models for freight delivery within urban environments. Crowdsourced solutions – where drivers are not employed by a carrier but occasionally offer their services through on-line platforms and are contracted as required by carriers – are … Read more