Reaching Paris Agreement Goal through CDR/DAC Development: a Compact OR Model

A compact operations research (OR) model is proposed to analyse the prospects of meeting the Paris Agreement targets when direct air capture technologies can be used or not. The main features of the model are (i) the representation of the economy and energy use with a nested constant elasticity of substitution production function; (ii) the … Read more

Modeling Design and Control Problems Involving Neural Network Surrogates

We consider nonlinear optimization problems that involve surrogate models represented by neural net-works. We demonstrate first how to directly embed neural network evaluation into optimization models, highlight a difficulty with this approach that can prevent convergence, and then characterize stationarity of such models. We then present two alternative formulations of these problems in the specific … Read more

Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming for Optimal Power Flow Problems under Uncertainty

We propose the first computationally tractable framework to solve multi-stage stochastic optimal power flow (OPF) problems in alternating current (AC) power systems. To this end, we use recent results on dual convex semi-definite programming (SDP) relaxations of OPF problems in order to adapt the stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) algorithm for problems with a Markovian … Read more

On the Fairness of Aggregator’s Incentives in Residential Demand Response

The main motivation of this work is to provide an optimization-based tool for an aggregator involved in residential demand response (DR) programs. The proposed tool comply with the following requirements, which are widely accepted by the residential DR literature: (i) the aggregated consumption should be optimized under a particular utility’s target, such as the minimization … Read more

Mixed-Integer Optimization with Constraint Learning

We establish a broad methodological foundation for mixed-integer optimization with learned constraints. We propose an end-to-end pipeline for data-driven decision making in which constraints and objectives are directly learned from data using machine learning, and the trained models are embedded in an optimization formulation. We exploit the mixed-integer optimization-representability of many machine learning methods, including … Read more

Exact and Heuristic Solution Techniques for Mixed-Integer Quantile Minimization Problems

We consider mixed-integer linear quantile minimization problems that yield large-scale problems that are very hard to solve for real-world instances. We motivate the study of this problem class by two important real-world problems: a maintenance planning problem for electricity networks and a quantile-based variant of the classic portfolio optimization problem. For these problems, we develop … Read more

Quadratic Optimization Models for Balancing Preferential Access and Fairness: Formulations and Optimality Conditions

Published in INFORMS Journal on Computing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47859-8_26 Typically, within facility location problems, fairness is defined in terms of accessibility of users. However, for facilities perceived as undesirable by communities hosting them, fairness between the usage of facilities becomes especially important. Limited research exists on this notion of fairness. To close this gap, we develop a series … Read more

A Graph-based Decomposition Method for Convex Quadratic Optimization with Indicators

In this paper, we consider convex quadratic optimization problems with indicator variables when the matrix Q defining the quadratic term in the objective is sparse. We use a graphical representation of the support of Q, and show that if this graph is a path, then we can solve the associated problem in polynomial time. This … Read more

ADMM-based Unit and Time Decomposition for Price Arbitrage by Cooperative Price-Maker Electricity Storage Units

Decarbonization via the integration of renewables poses significant challenges for electric power systems, but also creates new market opportunities. Electric energy storage can take advantage of these opportunities while providing flexibility to power systems that can help address these challenges. We propose a solution method for the optimal control of multiple price-maker electric energy storage … Read more

Statistical Inference of Contextual Stochastic Optimization with Endogenous Uncertainty

This paper considers contextual stochastic optimization with endogenous uncertainty, where random outcomes depend on both contextual information and decisions. We analyze the statistical properties of solutions from two prominent approaches: predict-then-optimize (PTO), which first predicts a model between outcomes, contexts, and decisions, and then optimizes the downstream objective; and estimate- then-optimize (ETO), which directly estimates … Read more