Modeling Adversarial Wildfires for Power Grid Disruption

Electric power infrastructure faces increasing risk of damage and disruption due to wildfire. Operators of power grids in wildfire-prone regions must consider the potential impacts of unpredictable fires. However, traditional wildfire models do not effectively describe worst-case, or even high-impact, fire behavior. To address this issue, we propose a mixed-integer conic program to characterize an … Read more

Chance-Constrained Linear Complementarity Problems

We study linear complementarity problems (LCPs) under uncertainty, which we model using chance constraints. Since the complementarity condition of the LCP is an equality constraint, it is required to consider relaxations, which naturally leads to optimization problems in which the relaxation parameters are minimized for given probability levels. We focus on these optimization problems and … Read more

Sensitivity-informed identification of temperature-dependent piezoelectric material parameters

An accurate characterization of temperature-dependent material parameters of piezoceramics is crucial for the design and simulation of reliable sensors and actuators. This characterization is typically formulated as an ill-posed inverse problem, which is challenging to solve not only because of its ill-posedness, but also because of parameter sensitivities, which vary by several orders of magnitude … Read more

Potential-Based Flows – An Overview

Potential-based flows provide an algebraic way to model static physical flows in networks, for example, in gas, water, and lossless DC power networks. The flow on an arc in the network depends on the difference of the potentials at its end-nodes, possibly in a nonlinear way. Potential-based flows have several nice properties like uniqueness and … Read more

A Marginal Reliability Impact Based Accreditation Framework for Capacity Markets

This paper presents a Marginal Reliability Impact (MRI) based resource accreditation framework for capacity market design. Under this framework, a resource is accredited based on its marginal impact on system reliability, thus aligning the resource’s accreditation value with its reliability contribution. A key feature of the MRI-based accreditation is that the accredited capacities supplied by … Read more

Machine Learning–Enhanced Column Generation for Large-Scale Capacity Planning Problems

Capacity Planning problems are a class of optimization problems used in diverse industries to improve resource allocation and make investment decisions. Solving real-world instances of these problems typically requires significant computational effort. To tackle this, we propose machine-learning-aided column generation methods for solving large-scale capacity planning problems. Our goal is to accelerate column generation by … Read more

New Location Science Models with Applications to UAV-Based Disaster Relief

Natural and human-made disasters can cause severe devastation and claim thousands of lives worldwide. Therefore, developing efficient methods for disaster response and management is a critical task for relief teams. One of the most essential components of effective response is the rapid collection of information about affected areas, damages, and victims. More data translates into … Read more

A Taxonomy of Multi-Objective Alignment Techniques for Large Language Models

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has evolved from single-objective reward maximization to sophisticated multi-objective optimization. Real-world deployment requires balancing competing objectiveshelpfulness, harmlessness, honesty, instruction-following, and task-specic capabilitiesthat often conict. This survey provides a systematic taxonomy of multi-objective alignment techniques, organizing the rapidly growing literature into four categories: (1) Reward Decomposition approaches that … Read more

Sparse Multiple Kernel Learning: Alternating Best Response and Semidefinite Relaxations

We study Sparse Multiple Kernel Learning (SMKL), which is the problem of selecting a sparse convex combination of prespecified kernels for support vector binary classification. Unlike prevailing \(\ell_1\)‐regularized approaches that approximate a sparsifying penalty, we formulate the problem by imposing an explicit cardinality constraint on the kernel weights and add an \(\ell_2\) penalty for robustness. … Read more