PGMODays 2021

Tuesday 30th november and Wednesday 1rst december, 2021

 

Invited speakers :

 

  • Marco Cuturi (Google Brain)
     
  •  Florian Dörfler (ETH)
     
  •  Wolfram Wiesemann (Imperial College, London)
     
  •  Hande Yaman (KU Leuven)

 

 

Program PGMODays

 

Marco Cuturi (Google Brain)

Differentiating through Optimal Transport

Computing or approximating an optimal transport cost is rarely the sole goal when using OT in applications. In most cases the end goal relies instead on solving the OT problem and studying the differentiable properties of its solutions w.r.t. to arbitrary input variables. After a short introduction to optimal transport, I will present in this talk recent applications that highlight this necessity, as well as concrete algorithmic and programmatic solutions to handle such issues.

More informations

 

Florian Dörfler (ETH)

Online Feedback Optimization with Applications to Power Systems

Online feedback optimization refers to the design of feedback controllers that asymptotically steer a physical system to the solution of an optimization problem while respecting physical and operational constraints. For the considered optimization problem many parameters might be unknown, but one can rely on real-time measurements and the underlying physical system enforcing certain constraints. This problem setup is motivated by applications to electric power systems and has historic roots in communication networks and process control. In comparison to other optimization-based control strategies, transient optimality of trajectories is not the primary goal, and no predictive model, running costs or exogenous setpoints are required. Hence, one aims at controllers that require little model information, demand low computational cost, but that leverage real-time measurements. We design such controllers based on optimization algorithms that take the form of open and discontinuous dynamical systems. In this talk we discuss different algorithms such as projected gradient and saddle-point flows, their closed-loop stability when interconnected with physical systems, robustness properties, regularity conditions, and implementation aspects. Throughout the talk we demonstrate the potential of our methodology for real-time operation of power systems.

Biography

Florian Dörfler is an Associate Professor at the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zürich and the Associate Head of the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. He received his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2013, and a Diplom degree in Engineering Cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart in 2008. From 2013 to 2014 he was an Assistant Professor at the University of California Los Angeles. His primary research interests are centered around control, optimization, and system theory with applications in network systems, especially electric power grids. He is a recipient of the distinguished young research awards by IFAC (Manfred Thoma Medal 2020) and EUCA (European Control Award 2020). His students were winners or finalists for Best Student Paper awards at the European Control Conference (2013, 2019), the American Control Conference (2016), the Conference on Decision and Control (2020), the PES General Meeting (2020), the PES PowerTech Conference (2017), and the International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (2021). He is furthermore a recipient of the 2010 ACC Student Best Paper Award, the 2011 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, the 2012-2014 Automatica Best Paper Award, the 2016 IEEE Circuits and Systems Guillemin-Cauer Best Paper Award, and the 2015 UCSB ME Best PhD award.

Website

 

Hande Yaman Paternotte (KU Leuven)

Models and Methods for New Variants of the Vehicle Routing Problem

New developments and environmental concerns change logistics practices, giving rise to new variants of the well known Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). The classical VRP assumes a single period, a homogeneous fleet of vehicles, a single depot and a single trip per vehicle. Starting from some practical applications, we will present VRP variants obtained by relaxing some of these assumptions and discuss how to adapt the models and methods developed for VRP to these new variants.

University website

 

Wolfram Wiesemann (Imperial College, London)

Optimal Hospital Care Scheduling During the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen dramatic demand surges for hospital care that have placed a severe strain on health systems worldwide. As a result, policy makers are faced with the challenge of managing scarce hospital capacity so as to reduce the backlog of non-COVID patients whilst maintaining the ability to respond to any potential future increases in demand for COVID care. In this talk, we propose a nation-wide prioritization scheme that models each individual patient as a dynamic program whose states encode the patient's health and treatment condition, whose actions describe the available treatment options, whose transition probabilities characterize the stochastic evolution of the patient's health and whose rewards encode the contribution to the overall objectives of the health system. The individual patients' dynamic programs are coupled through constraints on the available resources, such as hospital beds, doctors and nurses. We show that near-optimal solutions to the emerging weakly coupled counting dynamic program can be found through a fluid approximation that gives rise to a linear program whose size grows gracefully in the problem dimensions. Our case study for the National Health Service in England shows how years of life can be gained and costs reduced by prioritizing specific disease types over COVID patients, such as injury & poisoning, diseases of the respiratory system, diseases of the circulatory system, diseases of the digestive system and cancer.

Biographie

Wolfram Wiesemann is Professor of Analytics and Operations as well as Fellow of the KPMG Centre for Advanced Business Analytics at Imperial College Business School, London. Before joining the faculty of Imperial College Business School in 2013, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Imperial College London (2010-2011) and an Imperial College Research Fellow (2011-2012). He was a visiting researcher at the Institute of Statistics and Mathematics at Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria, in 2010, the Computer-Aided Systems Laboratory at Princeton University, USA, in 2011, and the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at Columbia University, USA, in 2012. Wolfram currently serves on the editorial boards of Computational Management Science, Computation Optimization & Applications, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Operations Research, Operations Research Letters and SIAM Journal on Optimization. Wolfram’s research interests revolve around the methodological aspects of decision-making under uncertainty, as well as applications in logistics, operations management and energy.