WATCH THE RECORDING HERE.

Andreas Wächter is a Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. His research interests include the design, analysis, implementation and application of numerical algorithms for nonlinear continuous and mixed-integer optimization. He obtained his master’s degree in Mathematics at the University of Cologne, Germany, in 1997, and this Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 2002. Before joining Northwestern University in 2011, he was a Research Staff Member in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, NY. He is a recipient of the 2011 Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software and the 2009 Informs Computing Society Prize for his work on the open-source optimization package Ipopt.

THE ARPA-E GRID OPTIMIZATION COMPETITION

In recent years, the US Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has been organizing the “Grid Optimization Competition.” To participate, teams from academia and industry submitted computer program implementations of specialized algorithms for solving large realistic Security-Constrained Optimal Power Flow (SCOPF) problems. The performance of the solvers was tested and ranked independently by the organizers, using large-scale real-life instances. The goal of SCOPF is the determination of the most cost-efficient operation of an electrical power grid in a such way that it can withstand contingencies in the form of outages of any its components. Mathematically, this is an extremely large-scale two-stage nonlinear and nonconvex optimization problem. In this presentation, the approach of several teams will be described, including that of our own GO-SNIP team that placed second in the first challenge.

Following the seminar IOE is holding a small reception in IOE Commons – 1709, snacks and refreshments will be served.

The MICDE Fall 2022 Seminar Series is open to all. University of Michigan faculty and students interested in power grid optimization are encouraged to attend.

This seminar is cohosted by the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery & Engineering (MICDE) and the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering. Prof. Wächter will be hosted by Dr. Salar Fattahi, Assistant Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering and Dr. Siqian Shen, Associate Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering and Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

This event is in-person only!

Graduate Certificate in Computational Discovery and Engineering, and MICDE fellows, please use this form to record your attendance.

Questions? Email [email protected]