Section: Application Domains
Energy Management
Energy management, our prioritary application field, involves sequential decision making with:
both high scale combinatorial problems (as induced by nuclear power plants) and non-linear effects;
high dimension (including hundreds of hydroelectric stocks);
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minutes (dispatching, ensuring the stability of the grid), essentially beyond the scope of our work, but introducing constraints for our time scales;
days (unit commitment, taking care of compromises between various power plants);
years, for evaluating marginal costs of long term stocks (typically hydroelectric stocks);
Nice challenges also include:
spatial distribution of problems; due to capacity limits we can not consider a power grid like Europe + North Africa as a single “production = demand” constraint; with extra connections we can equilibrate excess production by renewables for remote areas, but no in an unlimited manner.
other uncertainties, which might be modelized by adversarial or stochastic frameworks (e.g. technological breakthroughs, decisions about ecological penalization).
We have several related projects (Citines, a European (FP7) project; in the near future we should start the Post project (Ademe); IOMCA, a ANR project). We have a collaboration with a company, Artelys, working on optimization in general, and in particular on energy management.
Technical challenges: Our work focuses on the combination of reinforcement learning tools, with their anytime behavior and asymptotic guarantees, with existing fast approximate algorithms; see 6.4 . Our goal is to extend the state of the art by taking into account non-linearities which are often neglected in power systems due to the huge computational cost.
Related Activities:
We are in the process of creating a Franco-Taiwanese company (maybe a taiwanese company using French software) for energy optimization in Taiwan.
We have a joint team with Taiwan, namely the Indema associate team (see Section 8.4.1.1 ).
We have a “Ilab” in progress with Artelys (see Section 5.1 ) for industrialization of our work.
We organized various forums and meetings around Energy Management.