Publications

This article presents a distributed optimization algorithm tailored to solve optimization problems arising in smart grids. In detail, we propose a variant of the augmented Lagrangian-based alternating direction inexact Newton (ALADIN) method, which comes along with global convergence guarantees for the considered class of linear-quadratic optimization problems. We establish local quadratic convergence of the proposed scheme and elaborate its advantages compared with the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). In particular, we show that, at the cost of more communication, ALADIN requires fewer iterations to achieve the desired accuracy. Furthermore, it is numerically demonstrated that the number of iterations is independent of the number of subsystems. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is illustrated by running both an ALADIN and an ADMM-based model predictive controller on a benchmark case study.

Most countries have started vaccinating people against COVID-19. However, due to limited production capacities and logistical challenges it will take months/years until herd immunity is achieved. Therefore, vaccination and social distancing have to be coordinated. In this paper, we provide some insight on this topic using optimization-based control on an age-differentiated compartmental model. For real-life decision-making, we investigate the impact of the planning horizon on the optimal vaccination/social distancing strategy. We find that in order to reduce social distancing in the long run, without overburdening the health care system, it is essential to vaccinate the people with the highest contact rates first. That is also the case if the objective is to minimize fatalities provided that the social distancing measures are sufficiently strict. However, for short-term planning it is optimal to focus on the high-risk group.

We analyze the sensitivity of the extremal equations that arise from the first order necessary optimality conditions of nonlinear optimal control problems with respect to perturbations of the dynamics and of the initial data. To this end, we present an abstract implicit function approach with scaled spaces. We will apply this abstract approach to problems governed by semilinear PDEs. In that context, we prove an exponential turnpike result and show that perturbations of the extremal equation's dynamics, e.g., discretization errors decay exponentially in time. The latter can be used for very efficient discretization schemes in a Model Predictive Controller, where only a part of the solution needs to be computed accurately. We showcase the theoretical results by means of two examples with a nonlinear heat equation on a two-dimensional domain.

We present a branch-and-bound algorithm for minimizing multiple convex quadratic objective functions over integer variables. Our method looks for efficient points by fixing subsets of variables to integer values and by using lower bounds in the form of hyperplanes in the image space derived from the continuous relaxations of the restricted objective functions. We show that the algorithm stops after finitely many fixings of variables with detecting both the full efficient and the nondominated set of multiobjective strictly convex quadratic integer problems. A major advantage of the approach is that the expensive calculations are done in a preprocessing phase so that the nodes in the branch-and-bound tree can be enumerated fast. We show numerical experiments on biobjective instances and on instances with three and four objectives.