IE graduate students Bokan Chen and Leilei Zhang won second place in the MOPTA (Modeling and Optimization: Theory and Application) 2014 competition. They presented their work August 13-15 at Lehigh University and were advised by Lizhi Wang.
The following description appears on the competition website:
“The management of the electricity system is fundamentally changing and becoming increasingly challenging. This is mainly due to the transition to low carbon, sustainable, and renewable energy sources; and the need to reliably satisfy increasing energy demands in a scarce resourced, highly competitive, and interconnected economy. As a result, the development of novel and improved quantitative tools is required to support decision-making in all areas of the energy market (e.g., pricing of energy, optimal power flow, unit commitment problems, etc.). These tools will play a keystone role in supporting the continued evolution towards a smart grid for the generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption of electric energy.
In this case the aim is to consider one key decision-making process within the management of the distribution electricity system; namely, how to price the energy for the end consumers. This problem alone has been the subject of very active developments. Here, we will focus on one of the key aspects (among many others) that plays a role in deciding the price of energy for end consumers. That is, we will focus on taking into account the fact that consumers have the ability to change their energy consumption behavior based on the energy price at a given moment in time. The goal of your team is to develop effective, quantitative, user-friendly tools to support the desired energy pricing decisions by using the AIMMS modeling environment. AIMMS is an optimization modeling technology that is used by leading companies for supporting and improving decision-making in a wide range of industries.”
Read more about the competition here.