Essays on Average Incremental Cost Pricing for Independent System Operators

In a series of essays, we introduce average incremental cost (AIC) pricing and present examples to help understand its advantages. In non-convex markets, AIC pricing is the rough equivalent to marginal cost pricing in convex markets. We present a qualitative comparison of current ISO pricing methods and the AIC approach. We argue that AIC better … Read more

One-Pass Average Incremental Cost Pricing

Since the inception of ISOs, Locational Marginal Prices (LMPs) alone were not incentive compatible because an auction winner who offered its avoidable costs could lose money at the LMP. ISOs used make-whole payments to ensure market participants did not lose money. Make-whole payments were not public creating transparency issues. Over time, the ISOs employed methods … Read more

Fair and Risk-averse Urban Air Mobility Resource Allocation Under Uncertainties

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is an emerging air transportation mode to alleviate the ground traffic burden and achieve zero direct aviation emissions. Due to the potential economic scaling effects, the UAM traffic flow is expected to increase dramatically once implemented, and its market can be substantially large. To be prepared for the era of UAM, … Read more

Feasible rounding approaches and diving strategies in branch-and-bound methods for mixed-integer optimization

In this paper, we study the behavior of feasible rounding approaches for mixed-integer linear and nonlinear optimization problems (MILP and MINLP, respectively) when integrated into tree search of branch-and-bound. Our research addresses two important aspects. First, we develop insights into how an (enlarged) inner parallel set, which is the main component for feasible rounding approaches, … Read more