TITLE:  Operations Research Problems in Power Engineering

ABSTRACT:

The field of Electrical Power Engineering is undergoing rapid change, spurred by increasing demands for efficiency, the availability of new technologies, the drive to incorporate renewables and the need for for increased security.  As such, this field presents unparalleled opportunities for Operations Research.  To put it more precisely, there are substantial

opportunities both for developing new research problems within the Operations Research domain, and also for creating contributions to the practice of Power Engineering. In this talk we will survey a number of problem areas, survey previous work, and discuss challenges.

Bio:

Daniel Bienstock is Professor of Operations Research and of Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, where he has been since 1989.  He received the PhD in Operations Research from MIT.  His work focuses on mathematical optimization and on problems related to critical infrastructure, in particular the power grid;  he is the author of two books on these topics. He received the Presidential Young Investigator award, was the recipient of an IBM Faculty Research Partnership award, is an INFORMS fellow, was plenary speaker at the 2004 SIAM Optimization Conference and semi-plenary speaker at the 2005 ISMP.  He is the Editor-in-Chief of Mathematical Programming Computation.