Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Contract with Industry: ALSTOM-Inria Common Lab

Participants: Bruno Tuffin, Gerardo Rubino

Bruno Tuffin is the co-director of ALSTOM-Inria common Lab.

The group currently manages a project with ALSTOM on system availability simulation taking into account logistic constraints. Current ALSTOM Transport and Power contracts, especially service-level agreements, impose stringent system availability objectives. Non-adherence to the required performance levels often leads to penalties, and it is therefore critical to assess the corresponding risks already at a tender stage. The challenge is to achieve accurate results in a reasonable amount of time. Monte Carlo simulation provides estimates of the quantities it is desired to predict (e.g., availability). Since we deal with rare events, variance reduction techniques, specifically Importance Sampling (IS) here, is used. The goal of the project is to establish the feasibility of IS for solving problems relevant to ALSTOM and to develop the corresponding mathematical tools.