Brilliant Lecture by Chief Technologist Dr. Eugene Litvinov of ISO New England

Today we had the honor and privilege of hosting Dr. Eugene Litvinov, who is the Chief Technologist at the Independent System Operator (ISO) New England. Dr. Litvinov spoke in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series, which is organized by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. The student chapter, some faculty, and I had the pleasure of touring ISO NE's facilities in Holyoke, MA  last spring and Dr. Litvinov was so fascinating that we were thrilled when he accepted our invitation to speak.

He attracted an audience from the Isenberg School of Management, the College of Engineering, and even folks from Physical Plant at UMass since we operate our own microgrid as well as other guests from the community. It was great to see so many PhD students and even MBA students in attendance on a Friday afternoon.

The title of his talk was "Challenges of the New Grid."

ISO NE ensures that the lights stay on in our region, that is, this organization ensures electric power reliability. It is also involved in wholesale trading as well as planning for electric power.

We began his visit with a delicious lunch at the University Club at UMass and were joined by Professor Erin Baker and two of her doctoral students. She is the PI on an NSF IGERT on wind energy. Also joining us was one of our PhD students from the Isenberg School.

The conversation at lunch was so interesting. We discussed issues of survivability, cybersecurity and the grid, renewable energy, internships, skillsets needed in this industry, and other topics and we made it to the seminar location jut in time.

The audience was eagerly awaiting Dr. Litvinov'a presentation.

I started the introductions and then our new Student Chapter President, Zana Cranmer, completed the welcome. We also noted that the student chapter last week at our INFORMS conference in Philadelphia had received the summa cum laude award from INFORMS. We had chocolate cake (to be eaten after the talk) and our award plaque displayed.

Dr. Litvinov mentioned how the grid consists of the eastern interconnection, the western interconnetcion, and that Texas is its own country.

He noted that ISO NE manages $11 billion in energy capacity a year, which is mind-boggling. Every second the monitoring of supply and demand of electricity takes place since electric power cannot be stored.

New challenges for our region include that a big percentage of the fuel is now natural gas and we don't have sufficient pipeline capacity to transport it (our region does not produce natural gas). This winter could be interesting, to say the least.

He noted that we now need different ways of controlling the system since it is much more decentralized than it has ever been. He spoke of offering customers different levels of reliabilty, which I found quite interesting.

He also noted that the transmission architecture is a mesh and the distribution architecture of the grid is radial. He emphasized the need for greater flexibility. I very much appreciated his emphasis on the importance of definitions whether they are for flexibility, reliability, survivability,  or even resilience. He spoke about risk-based optimization, which I thought was very cool, and noted robust optimization several times in his talk. I might add that Litvinov has collaborated with Dimitri Bertsimas of MIT Bertsimas spoke in our series a few years ago, as did his wife, Georgia Perakis, who had the same advisor at Brown University as I did (Stella Dafermos).  so I guess Bertsimas is my academic brother-in-law.

Dr. Litvinov  emphasized the importance of keeping the system in balance and to manage the uncertainty. I liked him saying that one needs to determine the largest set of uncertainty that can be handled without violating constraints and said that he has a paper on this, which I definitely want to read.

Dr. Litvinov also discussed that we are moving from coordinated control of the grid to cooperative control (hopefully) along with decentralized decision-making. He had visited Paris recently and viewed how electric power is managed there.

He  presented quite a few mathematical optimization models so it was great for the students to see how important mathematical programming and optimization are in this critical infrastructure sector.

His lecture was brilliant and so impressive.

The questions that followed demonstrated the interest of those who attended. There were questions on renewable energy, what his vision for the grid would be for 2030, and even cybersecurity (a growing group at ISO NE).

Dr. Litvinov stayed to answer more questions and was very generous with his time and, given his reponsibilities, we are truly grateful for his visit and his talk.

And then it was time to indulge in a piece of delicious cake from Whole Foods. What a great Friday afternoon and what a terrific day, which started with meetings in Computer Science this morning.

Electric Power Reliability, ISOs, and an Upcoming UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter Tour

As the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, I am always on the lookout for activities and speakers that our chapter members would enjoy.

Several years back, we had a wonderful tour of ISO-NE, the Independent Systems Operator for New England, which is based in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

With so much happening in the smart grid arena, it was time to schedule another tour and visit there, especially since we have a new cohort of students.

The chapter will be going on a tour there and will get to see the control room (it truly is a spectacular sight with high-tech screens, networks, and power flows) on November 4.

And, we like to say that we are always VERY current -- in today's New York Times, there is a special section on Energy, and one of the articles,"On the Front Lines of the Power Grid," is written by a fellow Brown University alum, Matt Wald (whose wife lived down the hall from me freshman year in the Pembroke dorm).

The article notes that there are 100 Independent System Operators (ISOs) in the US that ensure electric power reliability. It also emphasizes the importance of training, education, and skill, and one of my former undergraduate students, who took my transportation & logistics class, is now an employee at the ISO-NE (He was also the President of the UMass bicycling club).

Interestingly, the article also notes the following:

Recruiting is a challenge, though. Grid entities look for candidates with some background in engineering, but they also need certain personality traits, like the ability to work collaboratively but not to debate endlessly. People with military backgrounds are favored, because they often have appropriate organizational and technical skills.

One aspect that makes the job complicated is that on the grid these days, there is a market not just for electricity, but also for “ancillary services.” These include the ability to ramp up and down quickly, which will be required as the wind and sun vary in intensity; the ability to add or subtract very large amounts of power in tiny fractions of a second, to keep the alternating current system working as closely as possible to 60 alternations per second; the ability to step in to control voltage; the ability to stand by for hours or days at a time, poised to start up if something goes wrong; and the ability, if everything goes wrong, to begin generating with no outside power to help.

I tell my students in operations that this is a great area to be employed in!

In addition, it is a terrific subject for research and I have had several of my doctoral students do research on electric power network modelling with our most recent paper using data from ISO-NE. It was published in the Naval Research Logistics Quarterly.

I highlighted our findings in my recent keynote talk on Sustainability: Methodology and Applications at SAMSI in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the theme of the workshop was uncertainty quantification and energy.

You can follow our chapter's activities on Facebook.

The Smart Grid -- Challenges and Opportunities

Today we heard a fabulous presentation on the Smart Grid by Mr. Richard Brooks of ISO - New England (NE). He is a Principal System Architect with responsibility for ISO-NE’s Enterprise Architecture since 2004. He is the primary author of ISO New England’s Smart Grid White Paper that was published in February 2009. Mr. Brooks spoke in our 2010 Spring Speaker Series to a capacity audience of researchers, faculty, students, staff, and guests from the community. The faculty and students were from the Isenberg School of Management, the College of Engineering, and Departments of Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics, among others. The interest in the topic of smart grids is huge and we were so delighted to have Mr. Brooks share with us his immense knowledge and insights on this most important topic.

The Smart Grid is the tight coupling of: the power and delivery system and advanced IT and command-control monitoring capabilities, and supporting regulations, policies, market rules, and business processes that will improve the overall efficiency of electricity production, delivery and consumption, evolving from the existing grid infrastructure while maintaining high reliability and strong security.

Some highlights from today's talk:

The US government is behind the push for a Smart Grid with stimulus money being like steroids for the Smart Grid. The government wishes to utilize advanced, information-based technologies to increase power grid reliability, efficiency, and flexibility, and reduce the rate at which additional electric utility infrastructure needs to be built.

Hence, there is an intense need and desire to make the most out of existing capacity, while, at the same time, taking advantage of such innovations as smart appliances and devices, distributed resources and generation, including renewables (think wind energy and solar energy), and even the deployment and integration of advanced electricity storage and peak-reducing technologies, including plug-in electric and hybrid electric vehicles (very cool)! Plus, consumers are to be provided with timely information and control options regarding their electricity usage.

We got to hear about the Olympic Peninsula GridWise project (in which clothes dryers reduced their power after a triggered event), and about the Google Power meter, now in prototype.

It was clear from the talk why a Smart Grid is needed (including the need to reduce electricity costs and the challenges posed by intermittent sources, such as wind, plus, the NIMBY issue of building new generation and transmission facilities).

The objectives of the Smart Grid include those for reliability, for the environment, and for consumer control.

Significant paradigm shifts are now underway, some of which are:

1. The construction of new facilities is shifting to more efficient use of the existing system (so this is a great area for operations researchers and management scientists to work in).

2. Static operations parameters are giving way to dynamic calculations (including dynamic pricing).

3. Large supply sources are shifting to small supply sources (think of households and businesses generating their own power).

4. Centralized control is moving to decentralized control.

5. Passive customer participation will be moving to active customer participation.

6. Manual operations will be shifting to automated ones.

We will need new analytical tools for demand management, supply management, and network management, as well as markets management, along with more careful collaboration and coordination among stakeholders in the electric power supply chain (something my research group has published a lot on).

Mr. Brooks also talked about the role of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) since it was tapped to lead in standards for the Smart Grid (and this is one of the great challenges since interoperability is a huge issue). He suggested that NIST/DOE/FERC should prioritize design work and standards for system control among controlling entities.

We urgently now need:

1. a clear view of the Smart Grid from different states and the regulators;

2. what is achievable and by when;

3. new business models (up my alley);

4. new cooperation/collaboration paradigms (sounds like a great app of cooperative networks);

5. direction and leadership among all levels of government.

Mr. Brooks concluded his brilliant talk by summarizing the risks and by stating that the Smart Grid will not go away, that more intelligence means more complexity (indeed, what to do with the deluge of data that is starting to come in), and that the number of Smart Grid projects will increase dramatically as stimulus money is distributed this year.

Above is a photo of Mr. Brooks with the group that accompanied us to lunch at the University Club to continue the discussions. The discussions among those who were lucky to be in his audience today will continue for days to come! He clearly educated us and inspired us to see the Smart Grid as a dynamic, highly important topic for both deep research questions, as well as for practice. His talk was multidisciplinary and just perfect for our Speaker Series. We are indebted to him for his terrific presentation today.

Learn More About Innovation and Scientific Research in South Africa and Beyond, the Smart Grid, Vaccines, Robust Optimization, and Supply Disruptions!

In the Northeast we have had a major snowstorm and it is a winter wonderland! The course grades have been submitted and before we catch our breaths, it gives me great pleasure to announce the Spring 2010 UMass Amherst Speaker Series in Operations Research / Management Science. Please be sure to mark your calendars and to join us,if you can. This series is now in its 12th semester of continuous operation and is open to the public. All talks take place at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst on scheduled Fridays in Room 112 from 11AM until noon.

I can share testimonials of audience members who have written to me and who have taken the time to thank me regarding our past speakers. Let it suffice to say that when undergraduates, grad students, faculty, and those from industry who have come to hear our speakers say that on Fridays when there is no speaker they are so disappointed -- that is the greatest praise. Speakers not only educate but inspire and open our eyes to new perspectives.

The Spring 2010 lineup will begin with a presentation on February 19, 2010 by Professor Mzamo Mangaliso of the Isenberg School on scientific innovation and research with experiences in South Africa. Professor Mangaliso served as the President of South Africa's counterpart of the US National Science Foundation and this talk is certainly going to be fascinating and very informative.

On March 5, 2010, we will be hosting Mr. Richard Brooks of ISO - New England, who will be speaking on the development of the smart grid, a topic not only timely but extremely relevant to consumers and businesses.

On April 2, 2010, Professor Sheldon Jacobson of the University of Illinois will be sharing with us his research on pediatric vaccines, their pricing and stockpiling issues. Professor Jacobson's visit is co-sponsored through the INFORMS Speakers Bureau. For more information on INFORMS, and its elegant new website, please click here.

Professor Dimitris Bertsimas of the Sloan School at MIT will be speaking on April 23, 2010. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has garnered numerous awards for his research. He will be speaking on robust optimization. His talk is co-hosted by the Finance Seminar Series at the Isenberg School.

On April 30, 2010, Professor Mehmet Gumus of McGill University in Montreal, Canada will be presenting his research on supply disruptions and selection of optimal suppliers.

We may also have an additional speaker on March 26, 2010, from abroad, but are waiting for final confirmation.

Full information on the titles, abstracts, and short bios of the above speakers is now available on the Speaker Series website.

As one departmental chair from outside the Isenberg School said to me, this speaker series is not only educational, but we are also providing a community service -- the talks in this series are not to be missed.

E-Cycling, Top Cited Papers, Electric Cars, and Copenhagen

With the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen next week, I thought it appropriate to highlight some of our environmental research at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks. Several years back my research team received two AT&T Industrial Ecology Fellowships, which supported the environmental research at the Supernetwork Center and provided partial financial support for three graduate students. These three graduate students have since all received their PhDs and now hold, respectively, tenure-track faculty positions at the University of Connecticut, the University of Sydney in Australia, and York University in Canada. You can find the recent doctoral dissertation titles and abstracts associated with the Center here.

One of the publications that resulted from the AT&T Industrial Ecology Fellowships, is a top cited paper in the journal, Transportation Research E (see above), entitled, Reverse Supply Chain Management and Electronic Waste Recycling: A Multitiered Network Equilibrium Framework for E-Cycling, which was co-authored with one of my former students, Dr. Fuminori Toyasaki. Elsevier, the publisher of this journal, puts out a ranking on a weekly basis of the top cited papers (published in the journal in the last five years) and the above paper has been on this list for months now.

Interestingly, the New York Times yesterday ran a front page article, In Denmark, Ambitious Plans for Electric Cars, which spoke about the partnership of the Silicon Valley company, Better Place, founded by Mr. Agassi, with Dong Energy, a smart grid company, to install and try to make feasible battery-charging stations in Denmark, specifically, Copenhagen, for charging electric cars. Denmark is providing at least $40,000 in tax writeoffs per electric car purchased and Dong Energy plans on generating a substantial portion of the electricity for the stations through wind energy. Denmark is even offering free parking to owners of electric cars in Copenhagen and I suspect that finding a parking place may not be too difficult since an earlier Times article stated that 50% of the commuters in Copenhagen commute by bicycle!

As yesterday's article noted, it will be interesting to see how many consumers can overcome any psychological barriers to the use of electric cars and being dependent on battery charging stations.

The article, however, neglected to mention the life cycle aspects of electric car batteries and the impact on the environment of their production and ultimate death and disposal.

Nevertheless, Denmark, as well as the above-mentioned companies, should be applauded for their ability to take risks and to innovate in the environmental space.

Electric Power Supply Chains and Grit

My co-author, Dr. Zugang "Leo" Liu, and I are very pleased that our paper on electric power supply chains and New England is now officially published and is available online in the journal, Naval Research Logistics; see: NRL. This paper required several revisions and even in its original format was a huge amount of work from the conceptualization of the large-scale mathematical model, the collection of the data, the asking of interesting and relevant questions, the coding of the algorithm(s) used to solve the model -- not to mention the actual writing of the paper, the design and drawing of the figures, including the networks! But the reward for the stamina and endurance needed to finish the paper, revise it according to the anonymous reviewers' and editors' suggestions, is to see it in print. In fact, it already is being cited internationally since it is the first general electric power supply chain network model with fuel markets and data for a large region and the methodology that we use for formulation and analysis is very cool, too -- that of variational inequalities. You can always read up on my Network Economics book to get some background. Our NRL paper can be used as the baseline for the investigation of not only tradable pollution permits (a very hot topic now) but also serve as a model on which smart grid issues can be formulated and studied.

Doing this project required true grit, and, just in time, the Boston Globe has a marvelous article on what it takes to be successful -- Grit! I think that you will enjoy reading the article as much as I did and it shows that you just have to stick to what you love and to work very hard at it.

However, when it comes to publishing, some highly original research papers can be and have been rejected. This topic alone we can write numerous blog posts on so I will just leave you with the following. You may have heard of a new journal recently founded called Rejecta Mathematica, which considers submissions of papers previously rejected elsewhere. It was founded by graduate students who decided to take action. Indeed, The Economist recently noted that Paul Lauterbur, the father of magnetic resonance imaging, had his seminal paper rejected when he first submitted it to Nature. He later received the Nobel prize for this work. Peter Higgs, the predictor of physics' missing boson, faced a similar experience with the journal Physics Letters (and he is expected to win the Nobel prize). So, the moral of the story is, hard work pays off and don't give up if you believe in your work!