As ACIE, Van Hentenryck will lead the development of “blue sky” initiatives, foster and nurture a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, facilitate translational research, and build strategic partnerships.

“I am happy that Pascal has agreed to serve as ACIE. In this role, he will be responsible for stimulating strategic thinking, innovation, and entrepreneurship within ISyE,” said School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “Pascal has the energy and drive needed for this role, and he will provide tremendous value to ISyE. I look forward to working with him in this capacity.”

Van Hentenryck’s own research complements this new position. His work centers on artificial intelligence, data science, and operations research. His current focus is to develop methodologies, algorithms, and systems for addressing challenging problems in mobility, energy systems, resilience, and privacy. In the past, his research focused on optimization and the design and implementation of innovative optimization systems, including the CHIP programming system (a Cosytec product), the foundation of all modern constraint programming systems, and the optimization programming language OPL (now an IBM Product).

“I am deeply honored – and also delighted – to take on this new role. There is a convergence of technologies at the union of AI and OR that promises to fundamentally change industrial and systems engineering, and even engineering as a whole,” said Van Hentenryck. “ISyE is ideally positioned to pursue these opportunities, given its strength in methodologies and its domain expertise in a number of disciplines. It is an exciting time, and I look forward to working with the faculty to pursue them.”

Van Hentenryck’s tenure as ACIE began in early October.

The original workshop was such a success that it has now become an annual event. This year it was held on November 14 and 15 at Georgia Tech and was attended by more than 80 participants from Europe, Canada, and across the U.S. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers, practitioners, and students from electric energy systems and operations research — typically separated communities — to have focused discussions on the nation’s electric systems. The conference was organized by ISyE Anderson-Interface Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Andy Sun and featured more than 20 speakers from industry, academia, and research labs.

“It is encouraging to see the enthusiasm from the attendees of the past three workshops,” said Sun. “We need a focused platform to bring together power engineering and optimization experts to help solve these problems. I think that’s why we see people coming back every year from practical day-to-day operations of power markets and the most prestigious academic institutes.”

ISyE Associate Chair for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck welcomed the group and reiterated the significance of a multidisciplinary approach to solve problems. Van Hentenryck also noted the importance of the informal discussions and networking that takes place during the workshop, in addition to the formal talks.

Workshop themes included the challenges in operations of large-scale electricity markets; new approaches for managing risks and stochasticity in electric markets; contingency analysis, probabilistic operation, and machine learning; recent advancements in optimal power flow control and computation; distributed energy resources and storage; and dealing with uncertainty, contingency, and health considerations in power grids.

“The most gratifying response is from students who attended and presented posters of their extremely high-quality research,” added Sun. “We hope that the students are as inspired as we are about the future of research in energy systems.”

Following the workshop, Professor Warren Powell from Princeton University, who was also one of the speakers, praised the event. “Fabulous workshop,” said Powell. “I think you have established this event as the best energy systems workshop in the country.”

The 2019 Workshop on Energy Systems and Optimization was made possible by the generous support of sponsors, including ISyE, the Georgia Tech Strategic Energy Institute, and the ISyE Anderson-Interface Chair. The team plans to host the workshop again in 2020.

In order to find a way to manage the intermittency – or stochasticity – of natural energy sources that introduce additional risks and uncertainties into energy supplies, the Department of Energy has awarded a three-year, $3.25 million grant to an interdisciplinary team led by Pascal Van Hentenryck, A. Russell Chandler III Chair in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). In addition to ISyE, the team includes the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). Their project, “Risk-aware Market Clearing for Power Systems” (RAMC), will examine how to assess and minimize risks when integrating renewable sources of energy, and how to advance stochastic optimization, machine learning, and their integration to meet the challenges of integrating substantial shares of renewable energy in the generation portfolio.

Van Hentenryck is particularly enthusiastic about working with MISO. The RAMC team will begin by learning from six years’ worth of operational data from MISO, which has a large and complex power system that stretches from Minnesota to Louisiana and incorporates numerous windfarms. The collaboration is also unique in that MISO has a strong research team that has already been actively working to solve the challenges of using natural sources of energy.

“MISO is one of the most innovative transmission operators in the U.S.,” Van Hentenryck said. “This partnership means that the research will be driven by real models and data, and will evaluate, with high fidelity, the impact and benefits of the optimization models the RAMC team creates.”

The Vanderbilt team brings decades of experience in risk assessment, which will be an integral part of the paradigm shift needed to address the increased stochasticity in load and generation. The goal is to transfer, adapt, and expand risk models from the financial industry and other engineering disciplines.

The group from ISyE includes A. Russell Chandler III Professor Roshan Joseph, Anderson-Interface Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Andy Sun, and Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics Jeff Wu, as well as undergraduate, Ph.D., and postdoctoral  students. They are specifically looking at how to solve the stochastic optimization problems arising in MISO’s real-time operations. Their high dimensionality, and the real-time constraints, raise fundamental challenges in computational statistics, stochastic optimization, risk assessment, and machine learning.

“The entire RAMC team brings a distinctive multidisciplinary expertise,” Van Hentenryck noted. “It is only through the tight integration of these fields that we can hope to overcome the computational barriers."

Accurate modeling of supply and demand for wind and solar is also a boon for consumers and national security interests, lowering costs and reliance on energy providers outside the U.S. Ultimately, the RAMC team intends to generate scalable solutions that can be adopted by other grid operators in addition to MISO.