This event is open to all IOE PhD students, faculty, and staff. Lunch will be provided. In order to get an accurate count for food, please RSVP by Thursday, January 23, 2020.

Title:
Gas-Aware Unit Commitment

Abstract:
The work aims at synchronizing the electricity and gas networks to avoid potential catastrophic failures during Polar vortex events. Recent changes in the fuel mix for electricity generation and, in particular, the increase in Gas-Fueled Power Plants (GFPP), have created significant interdependencies between the electric power and natural gas transmission systems. However, despite their physical and economic couplings, these networks are still operated independently, with asynchronous market mechanisms. This mode of operation may lead to significant economic and reliability risks in congested environments as revealed by the 2014 polar vortex event experienced by the northeastern United States; The scarcity of natural gas put the reliability of the electricity system at high risk and agitated its market. To mitigate these risks, while preserving the current structure of the markets, we explore the idea of introducing gas network awareness into the standard unit commitment model and propose a bilevel optimization problem. We developed a novel Benders subproblem decomposition technique that addresses the computational challenge in solving the bilevel problem. The model and the solution approach are validated on a case study for the Northeastern United States that can reproduce the gas and electricity price spikes experienced during the early winter of 2014. The results on the case study show that gas awareness in unit commitment is instrumental in avoiding the peaks in electricity prices while keeping the gas prices to reasonable levels and demonstrate that the developed solution method outperforms up-to-date commercial solvers and standard Benders method. This is based on a joint work with Dr. Pascal Van Hentenryck.

Bio:
Geunyeong Byeon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) at the University of Michigan (U-M) where she is advised by Dr. Pascal Van Hentenryck. She received her undergraduate degree in Industrial and Management Engineering from Korea University and obtained an M.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from Seoul National University. Her research interests are in the fields of operations research and data analytics, especially methodologies for large-scale optimization. She is particularly interested in applications in energy systems. She worked in the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a research intern in Summer 2019. She is a recipient of a Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant and MICDE (Michigan Institute of Computational Discovery and Engineering) Fellowship.