Seminar Abstract:
The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) recently organized the "Grid Optimization" Competition, offering a total of $2.4M in prizes.

ARPA-E's goal is to "accelerate the development of transformational and disruptive methods for solving the most pressing power system problems" in a market where revenues reach close to $400B yearly.

In this talk, we will go over the computational challenges underlying these optimization problems and present the solution approach adopted by the team that ranked first across all divisions.

Presenter Bio:
Hassan Lionel Hijazi received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Aix-Marseille University while working at Orange Labs - France Telecom R&D.
During his early career, Hassan was part of the Computer Science Laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique in France and a senior lecturer at the Australian National University. Hassan is currently a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His main field of expertise is mixed-integer nonlinear optimization with applications in energy systems. Hassan was the laureate of the 2015 Rising Star Award by the Australian Society for Operations Research. In 2021, Hassan was the winner of the ARPA-E Grid Optimization Competition Challenge 2, ranking 1st across all divisions. Hassan continues to work on gravity, a modeling language for mathematical optimization.

This presentation is part of our IOE Departmental Seminar (899) Series.
The Departmental Seminar Series is open to all. U-M Industrial and Operations Engineering graduate students and faculty are especially encouraged to attend.