Gal Dalal

Distributed scenario-based optimization for asset management in a hierarchical decision making environment

Asset management attempts to keep the power system in working conditions. It requires much coordination between multiple entities and long term planning often months in advance. In this work we introduce a mid-term asset management formulation as a stochastic optimization problem, that includes three hierarchical layers of decision making, namely the midterm, short-term and real-time. We devise a tractable scenario approximation technique for efficiently assessing the complex implications a maintenance schedule inflicts on a power system. This is done using efficient Monte-Carlo simulations that tradeoff between accuracy and tractability. We then present our implementation of a distributed scenario-based optimization algorithm for solving our formulation, and use an updated PJM 5-bus system to show a solution that is cheaper than other maintenance heuristics that are likely to be considered by TSOs.

Reinforcement learning for the unit commitment problem

In this work we solve the day-ahead unit commitment (UC) problem, by formulating it as a Markov decision process (MDP) and finding a low-cost policy for generation scheduling. We present two reinforcement learning algorithms, and devise a third one. We compare our results to previous work that uses simulated annealing (SA), and show a 27% improvement in operation costs, with running time of 2.5 minutes (compared to 2.5 hours of existing state-of-the-art).

Supervised learning for optimal power flow as a real-time proxy

In this work we design and compare different supervised learning algorithms to compute the cost of Alternating Current Optimal Power Flow (ACOPF). The motivation for quick calculation of OPF cost outcomes stems from the growing need of algorithmic-based long-term and medium-term planning methodologies in power networks. Integrated in a multiple time-horizon coordination framework, we refer to this approximation module as a proxy for predicting short-term decision outcomes without the need of actual simulation and optimization of them. Our method enables fast approximate calculation of OPF cost with less than 1% error on average, achieved in run-times that are several orders of magnitude lower than of exact computation. Several test-cases such as IEEE-RTS96 are used to demonstrate the efficiency of our approach.