Practitioners and academicians gathered in Bergamo, Italy for a three-day workshop on a hot optimization topic: the management of transmission and distribution power grids. The HEXAGON workshop had the purpose of exchanging ideas and showcase the latest results in the field. A unique mix of electrical engineers and optimizers from all over the world showed us how grids and their management are changing in a continuously changing scenario where huge transformations are taking place in both the production and the consumption of energy. The workshop is sponsored by FICO and is part of a national project that is funded by the Next Generation EU program.
Growing demand for energy, new energy sources, climate change, and the increasing number of electric vehicles: these are the daunting challenges that power grid managers face every day to ensure the delivery of energy to every last user. One of the greatest challenges is a fundamental problem solved by power grid operators, both at the transmission and the distribution level. It is a mathematical optimization problem known as Optimal Power Flow (OPF): across the whole power grid, the current through every line (or branch in Power Engineering parlance) and the voltage of every node (or bus) must satisfy several conservation constraints originating from Physics, and the operating cost of the grid must be kept to a minimum. Feasibility is not optional: physical constraints determine how alternate current flows through the network, and a grid configuration that does not satisfy all constraints can be a huge risk for all stakeholders.
As one can gather from the size and complexity of power grids, the optimization problem arising from their management is extremely hard: it requires modeling discrete decisions with integer and binary variables as well as nonlinear constraints. Hence the OPF class of problems belongs to Mixed Integer Nonlinear Optimization (MINLO). Although MINLO has been studied for a few decades, in recent years it has been of great interest to the Optimization community. New solvers that can tackle even large MINLO problems have appeared, among them FICO-Xpress, which as of version 9.0 can solve MINLO problems to global optimality. Finding globally optimal solutions for OPF is of paramount importance, as often practitioners choose sub-optimal solutions, which has massive consequences on cost effectiveness and ultimately on our power bills.
The purpose of the HEXAGON (Highly-specialized EXact Algorithms for Grid Operations at the National level) project is to analyze and develop solution tools that are tailor-made for the OPF class of problems. We aim at equipping the practitioners in power transmission and distribution with solver components that can be leveraged to finding globally optimal solutions to OPF problems.
The workshop took place in the beautiful Città Alta neighborhood of Bergamo, at the Salvecchio campus of the University of Bergamo. Surrounded by Unesco Heritage 16th-century Venetian Walls, the Città Alta citadel is among the most visited areas in the Lombardy region for its architectural and historical attractions.
We had participants from research institutes such as Électricité de France (EdF), IASI CNR, Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, and companies such as Optit. Many came also from international universities: Columbia, U. of Kassel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, King's College London, Ivey Business School, U. of Liège, and Princeton, as well as some Italian universities: Benevento, Bergamo, Milano, Pavia, Pisa, Rome "La Sapienza", and Torino.
Here is the list of presentations:
Power transmission and distribution is one of the most complex man-made processes. Power grids are authentic Engineering marvels that deliver energy produced in power plants (wind farms, photovoltaic panels, hydroelectric as well as coal and oil plants) to household, offices, and industrial centers across the country.
Growing demand for energy, new energy sources, climate change, and the increasing number of electric vehicles: these are the daunting challenges that power grid managers face every day to ensure the delivery of energy to every last user. One of the greatest challenges is a fundamental problem solved by power grid operators, both at the transmission and the distribution level. It is a mathematical optimization problem known as Optimal Power Flow (OPF): across the whole power grid, the current through every line (or branch in Power Engineering parlance) and the voltage of every node (or bus) must satisfy several conservation constraints originating from Physics, and the operating cost of the grid must be kept to a minimum. Feasibility is not optional: physical constraints determine how alternate current flows through the network, and a grid configuration that does not satisfy all constraints can be a huge risk for all stakeholders.
As one can gather from the size and complexity of power grids, the optimization problem arising from their management is extremely hard: it requires modeling discrete decisions with integer and binary variables as well as nonlinear constraints. Hence the OPF class of problems belongs to Mixed Integer Nonlinear Optimization (MINLO). Although MINLO has been studied for a few decades, in recent years it has been of great interest to the Optimization community. New solvers that can tackle even large MINLO problems have appeared, among them FICO-Xpress, which as of version 9.0 can solve MINLO problems to global optimality. Finding globally optimal solutions for OPF is of paramount importance, as often practitioners choose sub-optimal solutions, which has massive consequences on cost effectiveness and ultimately on our power bills.
The purpose of the HEXAGON (Highly-specialized EXact Algorithms for Grid Operations at the National level) project is to analyze and develop solution tools that are tailor-made for the OPF class of problems. We aim at equipping the practitioners in power transmission and distribution with solver components that can be leveraged to finding globally optimal solutions to OPF problems.
The workshop took place in the beautiful Città Alta neighborhood of Bergamo, at the Salvecchio campus of the University of Bergamo. Surrounded by Unesco Heritage 16th-century Venetian Walls, the Città Alta citadel is among the most visited areas in the Lombardy region for its architectural and historical attractions.
We had participants from research institutes such as Électricité de France (EdF), IASI CNR, Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, and companies such as Optit. Many came also from international universities: Columbia, U. of Kassel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, King's College London, Ivey Business School, U. of Liège, and Princeton, as well as some Italian universities: Benevento, Bergamo, Milano, Pavia, Pisa, Rome "La Sapienza", and Torino.
Here is the list of presentations:
- Dan Bienstock, Solving large-scale multi-time period ACOPF problems
- Marco Capelletti & Giuseppe de Nicolao, Probabilistic forecasting of wind power production: a generalized linear model approach
- Alfredo Vaccaro, Robust and Scalable Optimization Modeling: the enabler for reliable operation of decarbonized power systems
- Bissan Ghaddar, Polynomial Optimization Applied to Power Network Operations
- Marco Rossi, Coordinated planning of transmission and distribution networks based on optimization
- Filippo Pecci, Regularized Benders Decomposition for High Performance Capacity Expansion Models (online)
- Antonio Frangioni, The Segmented Pay-as-Clear Approach for (Energy) Markets
- Wim van Ackooij, On investment in power systems
- Paul-Niklas Kandora, Strengthening convex relaxations of the radial OPF problem via copositive optimization
- Ambrogio Maria Bernardelli, Optimal Power Flow problem: a study on Jabr relaxation
- Claudio Gentile, On cycle inequalities for the Optimal Transmission Switching
- Maria Teresa Vespucci, Analyzing the market power in day-ahead electricity market and provision of flexibility services under different TSO-DSOs coordination schemes
- Gabor Riccardi, A Parallel Algorithm for Large-Scale Capacity Expansion Models of the Power Grid
- Andrea Pitto, An optimization-based methodology for power system resilience enhancement in planning
- Angelo Gordini & Anibal Baradei, Integrated planning of multi-energy systems
- Bertrand Cornélusse, Considering the feedback of grid users when planning distribution networks
- Cristian Bovo, The N-1 security constraints modelling in AC-OPF problems
- Valentin Ilea, Transient Stability Constrained Optimal Power Flow Problems
Updated 2 years ago
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