9/22/16 | 4:15pm | E51-315 
Reception to follow.

Abstract: The AC optimal power flow (OPF) problem is a key optimization problem in the area of electrical power systems operations. We compare the strength of linear programing (LP), second order cone programming (SOCP) and semi-definite relaxations (SDP) of two formulations of the OPF formulation. Then we present a few families of cutting-planes to strengthen the (standard) SOCP relaxation of this problem. The strengthened SOCP relaxation is incomparable to the (standard) SDP relaxation. Extensive computational experiments show that these relaxations have numerous advantages over existing convex relaxations in the literature: (i) their solution quality is extremely close to that of the SDP relaxations and consistently outperforms previously proposed convex quadratic relaxations of the OPF problem, and (ii) in terms of computation times, the strengthened SOCP relaxations can be solved an order of magnitude faster than standard SDP relaxations. This is joint work with Andy Sun and Burak Kocuk.

Santanu Dey

Associate Professor
Georgia Tech

Bio: Santanu S. Dey is an Associate Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests are in the area of non-convex optimization, and in particular mixed integer linear and nonlinear programming. Dr. Dey holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University. Dr. Dey has served as the vice chair (Integer Programming) for INFORMS Optimization Society (2011-2013) and has served on the program committee of Mixed Integer Programming Workshop (2013) and the conference Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization (2017). He currently serves on the editorial board of Computational Optimization and Applications, MOS-SIAM book series on Optimization, and is an associate editor for INFORMS Journal on Computing, Mathematical Programming A, and SIAM Journal on Optimization.