Researchers at the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are working to determine the lowest-cost scheduling of electric power grids. They will include FICO's Xpress Optimization Suite in their work. This is part of the Lab's work on large-scale renewable energy integration, which is a subject of interest throughout the national research system.
LLNL is researching ways to determine which power generators to operate and how much power to produce at each generator to meet demand for a region at the lowest cost
The program is being used to solve problems at many time-scales, from long-term planning to day-ahead operations planning. The work involves solving the "stochastic unit commitment problem," which attempts to capture the uncertainty in the system, including such weather components as temperature, wind speed, and cloud cover. This problem can be cast as a large-scale mixed integer linear program, to be solved on thousands of CPU cores in parallel.
The Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium is collaborating with laboratory on the energy problem. According to the university, FICO is used due to the integrated offering of a math programming language, Mosel, that can handle processor communication for parallel algorithms.
FICO's Xpress Optimization Suite software is a platform for building optimization solutions that drive business process improvements. The company said the optimization suite provides ways to create, deploy and utilize business optimization solutions based on scalable high-performance algorithms, a flexible modeling environment, and rapid application and reporting capabilities for on premise and cloud installations.
