March 30, 2018, Javad Lavaei, University of California, Berkeley

Friday, March 30, 2018, 3pm-4pm
8 St. Mary’s Street, PHO 211
Refreshments at 2:45pm

Javad Lavaei
University of California, Berkeley

High-Performance Optimization Methods for Power Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and Case Studies

The design, planning and operation of an electric power grid depend heavily on several optimization problems such as optimal power flow (OPF), security-constrained OPF, state estimation and unit commitment. Recent studies confirm that the nonlinearity and high dimension of the existing power optimization problems may not allow the algorithms used in the power industry to converge to a high-quality solution in a timely manner, which would lead to wasting billions of dollars annually. To make the system more sustainable and resilient, these problems become even more nonlinear, significantly grow in size, and should be solved faster. In this talk, we will propose a new mathematical framework to address the above issues regarding the operation of power systems. Our framework rests on recent advances in graph theory, optimization and distributed control, including the notions of OS-vertex sequence and treewidth, matrix completion, semidefinite programming (SDP), and low-rank optimization. In particular, we will study five related mixed-integer power optimization problems, named power flow, security-constrained OPF, state estimation, unit commitment and transmission switching. We will show that real-world power networks have low treewidth, and as a result our computational framework is able to find global or near globally optimal solutions. We will illustrate our results on several real-world power grids with over 13,000 buses described by nonlinear equations subject to noise and corrupted data. 

Javad Lavaei is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at University of California, Berkeley. He was an Assistant Professor at Columbia University from 2012 to 2015. He received the Ph.D. degree in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 2011, and was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University for one year. He is the recipient of the Milton and Francis Clauser Doctoral Prize for the best university-wide Ph.D. thesis at Caltech, entitled “Large-Scale Complex Systems: From Antenna Circuits to Power Grids”. He has won several awards, including DARPA Young Faculty Award, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Director’s Fellowship, Office of Naval Research’s Director of Research Early Career Grant, Google Faculty Award, and Governor General of Canada Academic Gold Medal. Javad Lavaei is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and of the IEEE Control Systems Letters, and serves on the conference editorial boards of both IEEE Control Systems Society and European Control Association. He is a recipient of the 2015 Power & Energy Society PSACEC paper award, the 2015 INFORMS Optimization Society Prize for Young Researchers, the 2016 Donald P. Eckman Award given by the American Automatic Control Council, the 2016 INFORMS ENRE Energy Best Publication Award, and the 2017 SIAM Control and Systems Theory Prize. He is also the Electricity Cluster Chair of INFORMS ENRE.

Faculty Host: Michael Caramanis
Student Host: Rebecca Swaszek