Section: Application Domains

Energy Management

Energy management, our prioritary application field, involves sequential decision making with:

• stochastic uncertainties (typically weather);

• both high scale combinatorial problems (as induced by nuclear power plants) and non-linear effects;

• high dimension (including hundreds of hydroelectric stocks);

• multiple time scales:

  • 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);

  • tenths of years, for investments.

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.